chasing sheep

Zac Goldsmith vs Jon Snow - in a parallel universe

2010-07-17T17:52:00.002+01:00

How the Channel 4 News interview with Zac Goldsmith could have gone...

Zac: Thanks for allowing me to come on the programme. I know I've got some difficult questions to answer, but I first want to just say that the fact that you've brought this to the public's attention is important. What I've done looks odd - and that's because it's a broken system, in which a certain amount of bending of the rules is 'how it's done'.

Jon: Really? And this bending of the rules is acceptable? That doesn't sound like Cameron's 'new politics' to me ...

Zac: No - it most certainly isn't. It's very much old politics - but it's old politics that was in place before we were elected. We only have the opportunity to change things going forward - and no doubt a part of the review that Nick Clegg is undertaking of our whole political process will include a good look at spending during election campaigns, and how we keep a level playing field but get rid of the very complex and blurry guidelines.

Jon: So you don't deny that you were blurring the lines - fiddling the figures to come in under the limit?

Zac: Of course I don't - the notion that you could run an election campaign in a borough like Richmond and only spend eleven thousand pounds in the short period is insane. Susan Kramer will have employed many of the same formulas to get extra value into her campaign while still technically staying within the regulations. I checked everything, at every stage, with Conservative central office.

Jon: And they directly approved the transfer of £700 of boards - bearing your face and your name - onto the local election budget? You can prove that?

Zac: They did and I can. And just as importantly - the Lib Dems and Labour will have approved the same for many of their candidates. Why do you think Labour MPs weren't out this morning baying for my blood? It's because they know that all over the country the same formulas and techniques are used for calculating the short period spend. If the electoral commission find against me then they'll also be finding against hundreds of other MPs across the country - possibly all 650.

Jon: There's no doubt that others are also playing the system - we've looked at the expenses of 30 MPs that we feel have questions to answer - but yours were materially different from the others.

Zac: If that's the case - and I'm not convinced it is, but I haven't looked at the returns of every MP - then the electoral commission will no doubt carry out an investigation. This was my first election and I sought advice every step of the way - especially on spending. If we've got it wrong then the people of Richmond can expect my apology and a by-election - and I will be happy to run, and win, against Susan Kramer again, under new, clearer spending guidelines.

Jon: You'd resign your position?

Zac: I'd have no choice. But this practice is widespread, so if I'm forced to resign then it won't be just me - it will be MPs up and down the country, and at a time of difficulty that kind of uncertainty - not to mention the expense to the public purse - is not in the national interest, so I would hope that the outcome would be more balanced - probably a completely overhaul of the system under Nick Clegg's review of the whole electoral process that is happening anyway.

But these would be the defences of a sensible, mature, intelligent person.

Instead, Zac Goldsmith entered into the most staggeringly self-centered and short sighted display of arrogance I have ever seen on television. If you haven't watched it (and you should, unless you're a friend of Zac's, in which case I'd advise that you do everything possible to avoid it), here's the video.

A democracy can be judged by its ability to tolerate criticism and inquiry. Withstanding - and even encouraging - the challenge of the democratic process itself is vital for refreshing democracy, preventing it from falling out of step with the electorate's felt-truths.

For Zac Goldsmith to believe that his injured pride, and the ins and outs of an email exchange with C4 News that he only entered into after six days of refusing to give a statement, is worthy of nine minutes of prime time news is staggering. He clearly believes that the electorate have no valid interest in the workings of the electoral process. He doesn't understand democracy, and whether or not he went over the line in the massaging of his electoral spend figures, he's shown himself not fit to be an MP.

The Graduate Tax is the thin end of a wedge

2010-07-15T10:15:00.003+01:00

Usually I am of the mind that single issue politics are somewhat bankrupt, but you do have to have a few red lines, and I've decided that this is one of mine.

So I just sent this message (via twitlonger) to the Labour party leadership candidates - @Ed_Miliband @edballsmp @DMiliband @andyburnhammp and @dianeforleader

Why I cannot vote for a labour leader who backs the Graduate Tax:

Education of any member of our society has benefits for the collective.

The benefits may be very direct - nurses, social workers, doctors, teachers.

Or they may be less obvious but just as important - the ability to think critically to challenge faulty thinking by our leaders, a skill with communicating complex ideas so that many may take part in debates otherwise restricted to the few.

I have no doubt that there are a handful of courses that would make satisfying Daily Mail headlines, but for the vast, vast majority, those 3 or 4 years spent at university do result in a more developed mind.

We do not all start from the same place at birth, at 5, at 11, at 16, or at whatever age we realise we'd like to embark on a university course. Clearly not every degree course churns out latin-verb-declining, equation solving, book writing poly-maths. Does this mean that those courses don't add value? Not in my view. And that's what education is about. Yes - for individuals it can be life changing, but it's society changing too.

If there's a conversation to be had about what we teach on our university courses then that's a different debate. But as to how we pay for education - my view is clear:

Education is the silver bullet.

There is no problem in society which is not best tackled through increased levels of education. We are fools to exile it from the state.

Whether our problems are practical or social, increased education of our population is our best bet for anything from solving water shortages and energy deficits to tackling bigotry and personal responsibility for health.

Education helps us live longer, and contribute more to society in numerous immeasurable ways.

For some people, the confluence of education and other life choices and opportunities will result in an increase in personal wealth. As we have done for many years, we should ask these people to contribute more to the collective pot, through a combination of income tax and capital gains tax.

A separate tax on graduates corrodes our sense of collective benefit from education, and collective responsibility for paying for it. It is the thin end of a very fat wedge. What about taxing people who went to one of the schools at the top of the league tables? School education is more closely linked to the quality of state-funded input than university education, where personal responsibility (using skills you acquired before arriving) is dominant.

The argument for individual-payment for individual-benefit is one I'd expect to hear from people who put the individual at the centre of their politics. People who are blind to the randomness of the circumstances of their childhood, and equally blind to the miracles of mindful collective endeavour.

But to hear it from prospective Labour leaders? I'm shocked.

Education is the social-mobility lever. The level of education required to give a member of society a good start has shifted - as a symptom of success - from just being able to read and write, to needing to acquire a broad set of skills and then further specialise through education post-18. We should be celebrating and enabling this progress, embracing it as an emblem that proves that left-wing principles are about building a better society, not just propping up 'the poor'.

I cannot vote for any prospective Labour leader candidate who backs the Graduate Tax. Your views on education are - in my mind - the most revealing of your perspective on what social progress truly looks like.

---

I'm attending a labour party event where I hope to discuss this with them and other Labour members at the end of this month. I joined up after Nick shocked me by snuggling up with Dave, apparently not worried about the implications of a decision as long as he gets to make it. I was always a Labour supporter, but I kind of thought the Lib Dems were lefties too and in my constituency a cheese sandwich would have more chance of getting elected than a Labour candidate. Now I realise I need to be in the fight more actively.

As an aside, if you haven't seen this video, check it out for a would-be-funny-if-it-wasnt-screwing-real-people revelation of the extent of Nick's affinity with Groucho Marx*: http://www.twitvid.com/ERX9W

* "These are my principles, if you don't like them I have others." Thanks to blaugustine for that fantastic quote.

Warning: may contain Politics

2010-05-31T11:26:00.002+01:00

The sight of Danny Alexander and his defenders pointing to the fact that he hasn't, technically, done anything illegal seems to make a mockery of the core liberal value (as I understand it):

A healthy society is one with less, and not more, explicit legislation, because people can be trusted to do the right thing and not just the legal thing.

The three year exemption from CGT which Danny Alexander took advantage of was intended to avoid paralysing the housing market by wrongly taxing, as second-home-owners, people who found themselves caught in a sluggish housing market. Without it, there was the danger that buyer-sellers would have been completely unable to commit to a new home until they'd sold their old home, resulting in a total freeze of sales.

We could, of course, have doubled the detail of the legislation to specify many included and excluded situations, which would seemingly have excluded Danny Alexander from exemption, but isn't that exactly the kind of over-interfering legislation that Lib Dems are against?

I can just about forgive the average citizen for failing to make the connection between their taxes and the schools and hospitals they pay for. But MPs? Surely our MPs should be beyond reproach when it comes to tax avoidance. When the expenses scandal broke, the main defence was that 'everybody was doing it'. Except the Lib Dems of course, who won many people's votes (we have friends among them) on the grounds that they were not implicated in the great MP benefit fraud.

When Nick Clegg used his public platform to hammer home the 'fact' that his MPs had not taken advantage of the second-homes system, was he deliberately missing a key sentence: " ... as far as I know, but we haven't really bothered to look into it." ?

Even if we don't feel directly conned, it's all starting to look a little ridiculous.

How a chief secretary can convincingly implement a tightening of the loop holes he just used to his own advantage is beyond me. How a government can come down harshly on the tiny fraction of people who play the system for tiny sums of money which they may not be entitled to, while turning a blind eye to the blatant fraud carried out by their own colleagues, is also beyond me.

Integrity is, in my mind, defined by how we behave in the loop holes.

David Laws, 'a man of great integrity', appeals to us on the grounds of a pathological desire for privacy combined with an uncharacteristic attack of confusion: apparently he didn't understand that the definition of partner applied in his circumstances

I don't believe that claiming that you couldn't quite make sense of the commons rules about partnership, when you're simultaneously asking us to trust you to take a financial scalpel to society, is coherent. Either you're a very bright and clever person who can make sense of very complicated things, or you're not. If you got that wrong, and you really thought you'd got it right, how can you be so confident that axing the Future Jobs Fund is the right thing to do? How can you be confident that a brake on public spending isn't going to tip us into another recession? You didn't even realise that the lover you've lived with for a decade was your partner!

He cited the lack of joint bank accounts and separate social lives as the reasons why they weren't partners. Fantastic - hundreds of thousands of unmarried couples around the country can presumably start declaring themselves single parent families for the calculation of their family tax credit, because they don't have a joint account and she never goes with him to darts on a Thursday night?

Or... was he suggesting that there are different rules for gay people?

The burden of internalised homophobia is no doubt heavy for David Laws, but I don't really want my leaders dragging that kind of luggage around with them. Ignoring the possible influence it might have on their actual decision making, and the message it sends about his willingness to demand a society in which everybody is free to be themselves, it's a headfuck.

I don't want my leaders keeping huge personal secrets. The drain emotional and psychological energy. And if they don't then the keeper is barely human, and just as unsuitable for public office.

Apparently Alexander will be protected because it's just too embarrassing to go through 2 chief secretaries in a weekend. And Laws will be back, because greed and fraud and deception are forgivable in bright posh people, just not the estate-dwelling scum who play the system so that their kids don't miss out on school trips.

A final thought: I do not believe that David Cameron didn't know about David Laws. On the day he became PM, his security advisers will have asked him if he'd like to share the names of the people he's intending to appoint. If certain names came up, the advisers will have invited him to read a pertinent excerpt from the individual's file. I just can't believe that the fact that Laws is a closeted gay man didn't come up. If they couldn't put that together with his expenses record to make 4 then we should all be worried about what other skeletons are rattling in our cabinet's cupboards.

A Conservative might well give Alexander a pat on the back for his clever tax avoidance, but Laws? Knowing the public mood, Cameron must have realised that if it came to light it would destroy him - at least temporarily - and do irreparable damage to the reputation of the Lib Dems as the 'good guys'.

In Spain, we keep a jar of fish heads and tails to attract the wasps and flies away from where we're eating. It works rather well.

Like Bees To Honey - Chapter 1

2010-05-20T08:30:00.009+01:00

We are very pleased to be hosting the first chapter of Like Bees To Honey on our blog by the wonderful Caroline Smailes.

You can go on a blog journey reading different chapters from the book, to see the previous chapter head over to Caroline's blog.

To move on and read the second chapter go visit Helen Redfern's blog.

And if you would like to buy a copy then you can whizz over to Amazon.

Open publication - Free publishing

The triangle book is here!

2009-11-25T13:06:00.004Z

It's a real, proper, shiny book about triangles... as created by Badger and I, with help from the Head First team and my co-author Dawn Griffiths.

Very, very exciting:

And you can buy it here.

And then you too will know about triangles (other shapes also available) and I will earn about seven pence.

It is a very good feeling :)

Painting by numbers...

2009-10-15T10:22:00.007+01:00

We're not here much these days. The triangle book is now 3 triangle books, the first of which is published next month. Hectic is a good catch-all.

But mostly we've been battling the system.

In a nut shell, Master Melancholy is a lovely, bright, thoughtful boy who has great capacity for learning languages and seeing the big picture and still can't tie his shoelaces at 14.

Or use a tin opener.

Or a cheese grater.

Or catch a ball.

Or write on the shopping list legibly.

Or write more than 2 paragraphs of handwriting in half an hour.

Or consistently remember, between putting food on his fork and it reaching his mouth, that he is engaged in the task of eating.

Or appropriately choose his own wardrobe if we're going on a walk.

Or tolerate more than a few minutes in a supermarket without becoming visibly distressed (though he shuts down rather than making a fuss).

As ridiculous as it may sound, until the beginning of this year, Ms M and I didn't really know what dyspraxia was. These days it's known as Developmental Co-ordination Disorder/Difficulty.

Master M received an instant diagnosis of dyspraxia (it's obvious once you know...) from the incredibly helpful and lovely paediatrician and was duly referred to Occupational Therapist (OT) for assessment / therapy.

We arrived at the OT and were greeted with the statement that the OT prefers to call it 'Developmental Co-ordination Difference'.

We're all for positive labelling and not projecting negative stereotypes onto people who are different. And if Master M was being home educated, or we had the money to send him to the gorgeous, forward thinking private school down the road, and pay for private occupational therapy to help him gain independence, his neurological set up would genuinely amount to difference... but in the context of being a pupil at an old fashioned grammar school, and only having access to the NHS, it's a difficulty at best and a genuine disability at exam times.

The OT put Master M through his paces with a battery of tests and found that his fine motor skills are in the 2nd Centile. Only one child in 100 has more trouble than him with fiddly things and pencil control. He also struggled with aiming / catching, but managed to fluke a hit which he later described as 'missing in the same direction as the target'. Then on to gross motor skills, which Master M has worked hard on over the years. He did some excellent hopping. It lacked style but he hit all the markers.

Then, amazingly, she averaged the scores, and the hopping-skills lifted Master M's two 'red zone' scores into the 'amber zone'.

'See!' she exclaimed cheerfully 'You're not that bad really! We see other children who are much worse than you!'

She seemed puzzled by our lack of relief.

Incredibly, because he can hop, and despite the fact that his fine motor control is non-existant, he is not eligible for a service from the NHS. He's in the amber zone you see. Officially this places him 'at risk of a movement difficulty' and not actually suffering from one.

So - that sorts it out. We'll just write to the exam boards and ask if they can allow him to demonstrate his hopping in lieu of being able to produce an essay of the required length. I'm sure they'll jump at the suggestion!

Since then, we've done something we never thought we'd find ourselves doing, and gone private. We found an amazing place called Therapy in Praxis in York, who hear stories like ours all the time. We sat in the waiting room and heard parents talking about the school accepting that their child had serious problems (the kids we saw were gorgeous but clearly affected by something) but that the waiting list for therapy was 2 years. For a five year old. Who will be seven before he receives any help... *sigh*

Anyway - at Therapy in Praxis, Master M had a full day integrated assessment, including working with an Ed Psych and a speech and language specialist. It cost a fortune, but it was completely worth it. He felt understood. He felt validated. He is not crazy, or lazy (and I'm ashamed to say that at times I have wondered whether he could try harder) - he is disabled and the things he finds hard really are hard for him. Some are actually impossible using conventional tools.

We've since seen the paediatrician again, who praised our decision to go private, lamenting the lack of multi-disciplinary childrens medicine today. She is fantastic, and has confirmed that everything the private assessment turned up is real and significant and consistent with her observations of Master M. We'd been anxious that she might be sceptical, but she was quite the opposite.

It turns out that Master M doesn't 'just' have dyspraxia, he also has:

Clinically low muscle tone (caused in his brain so exercise doesn't fix it - basically he's floppy)
Hypermobility of his hands (he can't form a stable grip at all)
An impaired auditory loop (the 'talking to ourselves' that we use for short-term memory)
Sensory integration disorder (he can't make use of the information from his senses properly)
Auditory problems (he doesn't filter to favour voice frequencies, has super-human hearing!)
Vestibular problems (if he closes his eyes he has no balance - no wonder he hates the dark)

on top of all this he's also still dealing with the cleft palate he's had since birth, and consequent speech difficulties. Most importantly for his GCSEs, with his 2nd centile fine motor skills, any motor output requires complete concentration: he can write or think but not at the same time.

Together with his cleft palate, the difficulties he has can all be caused by a chromosomal partial deletion which he has now been tested for. We won't know the results for 3 months. Had he been born in the last 10 years he would have been tested at birth for it - one in 10 children with cleft palate have it, actually more like 1 in 5 or 6 once you discount causes such as drug use during pregnancy and other, more serious syndromes which Master M definitely doesn't have. This '22q11.2 deletion' syndrome can also include heart, kidney and immune problems, which may not be apparent until you look for them. Who would know if he only had one kidney?

Amazingly, the NHS don't appear to be retrospectively testing children with cleft palate who were born before we had the test available. "You were born before 1999 - so you can't have that, because we didn't know about it then... " seems to be the logic.

Ultimately we're lucky to have a paediatrician who is pulling out the stops to work the system for Master M. She sees the gap between his verbal IQ (top 5%) and his motor performance (bottom 2%) as a more sensible measure of his difficulty than simply averaging his scores across the board!

She's working out a way for him to have therapy from the autistic spectrum team - Sensory integration problems overlap with aspergers. She's also ensuring that at school he can use a laptop (doesn't require fine motor skills oddly!) and that they understand that they have a disabled child in their care who just happens to have been bright and hard working enough not to have received a diagnosis previously.

I had been under the illusion that we had great child health care in the UK. Gawd love the NHS and all that. I think I did a lot of filming of the glamourous end - open heart surgery and pioneering treatments - when I worked in TV.

I appreciate that health care will always be about numbers to an extent - cost-benefit analysis and so on. But we need to put a lot more thought into the way numbers are used to make decisions in health care, particularly in child health care, where the decisions are so life changing. There is no meaningful average of hopping and handwriting, and the fact that other kids, with parents less able to fight for them, are also not getting a service because of this kind of misuse of mathematics is depressing.

Excel spreadsheets are not professionally trained and haven't taken the hippocratic oath.

Badger obssessed?? me??

2009-09-17T10:57:00.008+01:00

Well, it has sure been quiet on Chasing Sheep this summer, but today I have a special something to share. On turning the house upside down in search for my mother's ~~sock~~ camera. I came across something I wrote many moons ago when I was just a Badger cub. Aged 8.

I was most impressed that my choice of paper features a Badger, clearly this love of Badgers runs deep. If you want to read the note below you can click on it for a bigger view. Oh and incase you were interested, no boy with purple hair, nor even brown hair appeared outside when I smiled. I wonder why I had such an issue with his hair colour? Anyhow I can now confirm to you that Fairies are not real. Unless they were especially busy in the 80's perhaps.

oh, and I found my mums camera too! phew!

2009-05-17T11:11:00.001+01:00

The revelations over MP's expenses claims have been a source of alternating hope and anger in our home this week. Anger that so many of our politicians are so out-of-touch, disrespectful and downright dishonest with tax payers' money. Hope that this crisis for our political parties may be the nail in the coffin for personality-politics.

In a small community we can select our alphas based on personality. We may have a personal relationship with them, or with their friends and family. We know how they treat their dog, whether they recycle their bottles, how they behave in the pub on a Friday night.

In a medium sized community we no longer have enough concrete evidence on which to judge them by 'Who?' We need to turn instead to 'What?'. What would they do about the relatively homogenous needs in our community? What kind of policies are they proposing for our local school / hospital / refuse collection? Do those policies make sense to me as an individual living with the same problems as my fellow voters?

In a massive community our problems are heterogenous. Even 'What?' has no coherent answer. Living in a small farming village, 90% of the news bulletin is of no relevance to my every day life. The policies may not fit my needs, and may even make my situation worse. But if you can speak to me about 'Why?' - sell me your ideology - then perhaps I can understand why you would put a higher tax on the only kind of vehicle which can drive through the ford between one side of my village and the other.

Personality politics is a nonsense at a national level. Policy politics is a pseudo-rational ruse we use to pretend that the world is more predictable and less chaotic than the evidence bears out. Problems are emergent, and no government can anticipate the nuts and bolts of the problems two or three years into their term, and yet we budget our policies to the nearest pound or dollar and take comfort in the (false) certainty of numbers.

Ideology is fuzzy and hard to live up to, fraught with painful conscience jerking stuff and the inevitability of imperfection. But I can't see any other way to elect a leadership with any real confidence that they won't flip-flop on the things we believe are most important.

Manifestos should be about values. What, and who, matters? - and let's assume, wannabe alpha, that it's not you.

I have a suggestion for resolving the second-homes and salaries issues for our MPs.

• All MPs required to sit in a particular place (London / Edinburgh / Cardiff) should be provided with a tax-payer-funded second home within a half-hour commute of their place of work, via the normal social housing system. A nice 2 bed flat on the Elephant and Castle estate perhaps? If they choose not to live there then it should be at their own expense, and they might want to carefully word their explanation of why this is a fit place to live for 'normal' people but not for them.

They shouldn't be allowed to manipulate the system - they put their application in and when it comes to the top of the list they have to take what they're given. Can you imagine the difference to the content of PM's question times if every housing estate in our political capitals had an MP actually living there?

• MPs should receive the same salary as the average secondary school head teacher, with London weighting. They should also receive the same terms and conditions. I believe this is in the region of £60,000 - 80,000. They should also have the same expenses system as teachers - if it's fair enough for the people who do the most important job in our society then it's surely good enough for our politicians. Their jobs are not dissimilar to a great extent - they don't require hardhats, they probably need a lot of printer ink.

Back to ideology for the arguments: if they expect their salary and housing needs to be met by the state, I'd like to have a conversation which abandons 'who' and 'what' and sticks to the 'why?':

Why are your housing needs so much greater than that of any other family?

Why do you consider yourself to be more worthy of remuneration than the folk who run our secondary schools?

Ah... no - I think you've strayed into 'what?' there - stick to the 'why?' please...

Badger Spotting

2009-03-31T21:24:00.005+01:00

Badger has been talent spotted! After reading her post-of-the-week-winning description of Tourette's Syndrome, Badger was contacted.......and the BBC disability website now has a new regular contributor.

Find her first post here.

Well done, Badger...we are all incredibly proud of you!

T-shirts by Badger

2009-03-26T21:00:00.003Z

Yes it's true, I have made T-shirts from my cartoon animals.

CLICK HERE to see them and you can even buy them, which is terribly exciting indeed.

Lambing, and the importance of caring for the little runty ones

2009-03-24T09:39:00.003Z

Ms Melancholy is very good with the little, tiny, weeny lambs who don't know how to feed. She has endless patience with them, as do the farmers in our village who we're helping out during lambing.

Funnily enough it hasn't put us off eating lamb, though we have made a family decision recently - initiated by Master Melancholy - to be much more strict about the welfare and environmental impacts of the meat, eggs and milk we buy. We'd been doing it *mostly* but now it's for real. Badger could not have ham this week because we have not yet found a source of free range ham - free range local bacon, yes, but not ham.

These two things strike me as being not unconnected to the stories in today's news about the appalling way in which our - yes OUR, we own it, we pay for it, it belongs to all of us - National Health Service fails people with learning disabilities.

Here's the thing: it is in all of our interests to make sure that people with disabilities, children and animals in our society are treated with the utmost respect and care. This is a reflection of the true measure of survival protection which our society affords. A hospital service which will only take care of you if you are able to stand up for yourself is barely worth having. When you need it most, when you are unconscious or without voice, delirious with pain or medication, or just too sick to know what is going on, it is most likely to let you down.

A society which respects the needs of the people who are least able to express them will always be in a better position to catch you when you fall. And one day we all will - it's about the only guarantee we all have in life.

Like most folk, my own survival depends largely upon a careful balance of distraction and denial. Disturbing this balance has potentially unintended consequences, such is the depth and breadth of stuff I am carefully ignoring. And something tells me it is all connected. Don't think about the conditions the chicken in your sandwich lived in, don't think about the kids who just wish they had any kind of sandwich at all (other than to justify eating this sandwich, because it would be criminal to waste it when others are hungry...), don't think about the people who are starving to death in our own hospitals because they're unable to speak up, don't think about the fact that we're all spending money on crap while our hospitals struggle and fall to pieces...

Where do we begin?

I think we begin with the little ones. And I think it has to be a concrete experience. And I think we could do worse than to get our major politicians down to the Yorkshire Dales to do a bit of lambing.

And then... I could do it.

2009-03-13T23:30:00.007Z

I have this habit of whenever I start a new project of having a little panic where I remember that I have no clue what I am doing and I am actually really a bit rubbish.... but then I pull myself together and as if by magic it all comes together and I realise I really am cleverer than I think I am.

So you will understand that when I started illustrating the Climate Change book I obviously went through the same process, but today I have drawn these and I look at them and I can not believe I drew them.. but I did.

So maybe I really am an Illustrator, I wanted to be an illustrator when I was 7 years old. And wowzers just maybe I really am!

(.... you can click on the picture to see them bigger.)

And then it was done.

2009-02-23T02:44:00.003Z

At 2.42 am I finished the first end-to-end draft of the climate change book. It has been a little like birthing an elephant but I think it's because we've engaged and re-engaged with the content on so many levels, as well as developing what I think is a completely new format with Badger's wonderful left-page-right-brain illustrations.

Thank you to everybody who has read and chatted about ideas within the book - there's a lot I've bounced around on the blog as a way of getting myself going when I lost my confidence in my ability to write. It has been a key part of the process for me in many different ways.

Anyway, this week I need some readers. It's going to a proofer / editor but what I also really need is a bunch of people to read all or some of it and let us know your thoughts. Probably what I'll ask people to do is direct feedback to the proofer / editor (the cornish cowgirl) and then she can filter through it and protect my ego for you, so you don't have to worry and can just tell me the nice things ;)

Let me know if you're interested!

A genuine proposal for a crazy experiment in economics

2009-02-22T18:09:00.003Z

Society is all about experimentation. I've been saying it a lot recently.

Public health care, education for all 5 to 16-year-olds, income based taxation, child benefit, law and enforcement of law - none of it is divine wisdom or pure science, it's just social experimentation. It begins from someone, or several people, sitting down and saying "Bear with me for a second - I think I've got an idea. What would happen if we... ?" and some time later, often many years later, we get to experience the concrete world's clues about whether it was a great idea, a terrible idea or a pretty-good-but-flawed idea.

So.

Bear with me for a second - I think I've got an idea.

What would happen if we decided, collectively, that house prices were approximately correct ten years ago, at which point they'd been near enough stable for a decade?

What would happen if we said that anyone who had bought a house in the last ten years had been mis-sold to, and we accepted that as a society we have a collective responsibility through having allowed, and often encouraged, our housing to become a pyramid sales scheme?

What would happen if we opened up the option for anyone who had bought a home in the last ten years to have their mortgage reduced to the recalculated value of their home - taken as the price 10 years ago adjusted for inflation - in return for an agreement that should they sell it in the next decade they would have to do so at this new valuation readjusted for further inflation?

What if we provided the liquidity and bad asset underwriting the banks are ~~scheming~~ screaming for through this method? Of course they'd lose out on some of the profits they might otherwise make off the 125% mortgage they mis-sold to people who are now in negative equity... but isn't that their own fault for having been a huge part of the problem? After all, the Halifax & co released statements along the lines of "House prices will go up and up and up next year!" and thus pushed up unsustainable price inflation.

I have been asking this 'what if?' for a couple of days, and I think most concerns have an answer.

What if home owners don't want to say their home is worth £100k instead of £200k? Won't they be losing £100k?

- That's fine, it's not compulsory. If they believe they would be losing a fantasy £100k that no longer exists then they are welcome to cling on to it, and keep their £180k mortgage. If they agree that their house is only worth what someone will pay for it then they might see it as dumping £80k of debt instead.

Some people will get more debt relief than others!

- Yes. They will. If you believe that you miss out when someone else eats chocolate then you're likely to see it that way. I don't even have a mortgage. I just would like to live in a society where average families can afford avergage mortgages on average houses without both parents having to work two jobs. I think that's good for the world generally.

Some people won't deserve it - they were greedy to try to buy the house they wanted.

- True. But most people have just been desperately stretching themselves to buy normal family homes with a tiny patch of garden for the kids to mess about in. If 90% of recipients are deserving does it really matter if 10% should have made better decisions? Does it matter because it's character building for those ten percent to face repossession, even though housing homeless families, providing legal aid to people facing repossession is expensive to society too?

Most people didn't buy a home in the last ten years.

- True. But most of those people had bank accounts with the banks that provided the mortgages, so we collectively funded the whole scenario even if we didn't drink the kool aid ourselves. And if you were born early enough to have a salary sufficient to buy a house in the 1970s or 1980s does that really make you morally superior to folk who only turned 21 in they year 2000? Should you congratulate yourself on having cleverly decided to be born soon enough to get on the property 'ladder' before the latest boom cycle, or were you just lucky?

What about people who have buy-to-let mortgages and second homes?

- People who bought for investment purposes should have balanced the risk with the reward. A home that you live in isn't an investment - it's a place to live. While I'm personally a fan of renting I can understand why many people, especially those with kids, felt that if they wanted stability and decent quality housing they had no choice but to buy a home. This would only apply to first homes - the one you actually live in.

---

The banks will get the money anyway. I believe that the best way of giving it to them is through clearing mortgages which should never, ever have been provided, which the government, the banks and the rest of us who didn't flood the streets protesting against an insane upward spiral in house pricing all collectively contributed to the existence of.

If you are interested in finding out whether the folk who make decisions about this sort of thing might take this proposal seriously then blog a link to this post and comment. I'll gather a list of links in, combine it with the comments, and send it as a petition to anyone I think might take an interest.

You never know.

How long is the world's washing machine cycle?

2009-02-19T16:18:00.002Z

We use an analogy in the climate change book about the washing machine of the concrete world.

Until we throw our abstract ideas, hopes, dreams, plans and theories through a couple of wash-rinse-spins in the Real World we've really very little to judge them by, other than ethics.

Simple theories can produce real-time concrete feedback from which we learn quickly - children building block towers don't have to wait to find out whether their positioning of the next block is just right or just wrong.

But most of what we do as adults doesn't bring real-time feedback at all. The greater the impact of the decision the more likely its consequences will only be visible shortly before, or even after, our deaths.

What I find astounding is how dramatically our judgement, our felt-truth about whether something, or even someone, is good or bad, can change - without them making any new decisions. The city dealers and heads of our banks who until a few months ago were generally considered to be entitled to their fat salaries on account of the huge profits they were producing suddenly appear to be greedy, ignorant and foolish. They haven't done anything different or new, and if there was a 'tipping point' then it was simply the first visible crack which led us to look more closely at the real state of their affairs.

It has also become clear that while they were happy to personally make vast sums of money on profitable deals they were not prepared to lose vast sums of money when they didn't come up trumps.

I have no doubt that mums and dads of people high up in the banking industry felt proud of what their kids had achieved. Would you want to tell your neighbour your child was a stockbroker today?

To me, the most intriguing aspect of what the washing machine has spun for us recently is that 'we', in our hundreds of millions, could not bring ourselves to do the simple addition that revealed the house of cards before.

I am not unsympathetic at all to those whose jobs and homes are lost or in jeopardy, but home ownership and investment in business had become some sort of bizarre pyramid sales scheme in which most people were hoping for their slice of free pie, without really recognising the nonsense of it. They were prepared to be winners without really acknowledging that such gains require a balancing loss and the creation of losers too.

Looking around the UK today I think we're all losers - we've pumped our housing market up to a level where the only practical option for most families is for both parents to work full time. I have no concept of how single parents begin to approach buying a modest family home with a small garden. Never mind the social change of women in the workplace, the economic truth is that looking after our own children, whatever the gender of the carer, has become unrealistic. But don't worry, we've all made 100k of pretend money which we can't unlock without going back to renting or moving into a caravan.

And who has really profited, while houseprices spiralled and mortgages grew larger and larger? Oh - the same estate agents and bankers who kept forecasting houseprice growth! Goodness, what a co-incidence. I don't suppose they had any selfish interest in selling that concept did they?

What if the value of our homes was actually about right ten years ago? What if we agreed en masse that ethically a home should be a place to raise a family, live a life, be a citizen, not a financial investment? What if, in order to have a generation of children who can grow up with values about kinship, we had to not just sit back and watch house prices trickle down but actively engage in a discussion about what a home should cost in the UK such that an average family can afford to have at least one adult raise those kids? What if we held our banking industry to account for their part in house price hysteria and instead of just bailing them out with cash directly, we provided that fluidity to them by paying off a chunk - proportionate to the disparity between the perceived value at sale and the ethical value we agree on - of every mortgage taken out in the last decade? I don't have a mortgage... but I'd still vote for that to happen.

The truth of the concrete world is that we can only add value by adding value. Industries which don't add value can only ever be sustainable by taking a reasonable charge for the convenience of service, allowing those who add value to get on with adding value even more efficiently. Stockbrokers don't add value. Mortgage brokers don't add value. Estate agents don't add value. They are middle men, no different and somewhat less honest than folk selling fruit on a market stall. The idea that they should be rewarded for this as if they were brilliant surgeons, engineers, inventors or scientists - simply because their lemons are more expensive - is one of the capitalist felt-truths which I hope this washing machine cycle has scrubbed away.

SAS Cat

2009-02-04T23:37:00.006Z

Frank is back on mousing duty... it has become clear that he is in training for some sort of serous cat mission.

He will not lay on a comfy cushion for any longer than a 10 minute stint without removing himself and spending twice as long laying on the cold ground or a rough service.

I have been gathering photographc evidence of Frank in training as you will see from the below shots....

Shot 1: Stealth position, the most uncomfortable spot in the lounge, a huge sofa and 2 dog beds to choose from but no... he goes for the over filled magazine rack.

Shot 2: Laying 'next to' his bed on the hard wood. His bed on this occasion being my old orange fleece. It is old and no longer worn by me because it is orange with red paw prints, need I say more.

.... finally Shot 3: I spotted this orange spot in the distance out the back of the house way up smack bang in the middle of the field, with no protection from the elements at all... and I must add here that it was freezing cold. Upon retrieving the binoculars I saw that it was indeed Frank doing more stealth hard core training.

Lets hope he catches alot of mice and all that hard boy training pays off!

People are amazing

2009-01-27T14:44:00.002Z

Over on 1000thingsthatmatter.com, this video: "What matters to first graders?" has just made me grateful, again, for the generosity of spirit which people continue to show and share online.

We have 400+ entries now, almost all from different people, and seemingly from every country in the world. Amazing.

A phrase to keep in mind when filing your tax return

2009-01-23T12:01:00.002Z

The redistribution of hope

The safest society is one in which everybody has enough to lose.

(This may also be of use to certain governments when making decisions about whether to bomb the hell out of neighbouring countries.)

Is it just me or...

2009-01-23T11:34:00.004Z

...is it completely inappropriate to imprison someone for being clever enough to hack into the US government's computers?

Super-hacker Gary McKinnon has recently been diagnosed with Aspergers. No shit sherlock. Even a cursory glance leads you to believe that this guys is special - in every sense of the word. He has just won the right to have a judicial review of the decision to extradite him to the US to serve a jail term of up to 70 years. The alternative is that he serves a shorter sentence - 3 or 4 years - in the UK. Which still makes no sense to me.

What possible benefit is there to society in taking a gifted individual without malicious intent and chucking them behind bars?

Of course a frightening proportion of our prison population have learning difficulties, an autistic spectrum disorder or a serious mental health problem, so Gary will be in good company. But we mustn't let that nag away at our collective conscience, or we might be forced to recognise uncomfortable truths about there being consequences to our own actions as well.

Why is nobody pointing out that we should just tell the US to stick it and hire the guy to sit in whatever surroundings he prefers and spend as much time as he wants trying to hack his way into things we think are secure? Why isn't our government pulling a national-security card of its own to make sure we don't let slip an opportunity to capture some of Gary's potential to the benefit of society?

Criminalising someone for being gifted, curious, motivated and a bit weird is not a decision which makes sense to me. Apparently the issue is that there was half a million quid's worth of 'damage' - which must look like a handful of coppers compared to the cost of the legal process to pursue Gary's extradition so far.

As far as I'm aware, nobody has been physically harmed as a result of Gary's suboptimal decision making. Which is more than can be said about the folk who run our country... and if costing a government money is a criminal offence then there's a whole financial industry, not to mention some rather relaxed regulators, who might want to tee up their lawyers now.

It's complete and utter nonsense and it's about time we reinstated the original basis of our legal system, which was not the decision of 12 different experts who have no relationship with you, but on a jury of your peers - folk who could put your actions in the context of your life, your strengths, your weaknesses and your personality, and had lived with the same struggles you faced.

I'll shut up now.

Turning up the contrast

2009-01-16T14:56:00.002Z

Becoming a family - Ms M, Badger, Master M and me - has been enlightening. And, more dramatically, it has been endarkening.

Every wonderful high has a deeper shading behind it. The possibility of never-again.

It reminds me of my dad's observation that fear of heights is a misnomer for fear of depths. The incidence of falling upwards is reassuringly small, but in climbing we create the potential energy that could be converted to kinetic energy with dramatic results.

I do not understand the heathrow decision. Unless we are all to be issued with helicopters to transport us to and from the airport I cannot imagine how it would be possible to cram the trains and tubes and roads more tightly than today. Surely it's not for flying in avocados? The world is quite clearly mad.

A new kind of disappointment in our government

2009-01-15T08:22:00.002Z

Disappointment in our leaders is inevitable. They obtain their status by claiming to believe x, y and z to be important, and when we fickle members of the population begin to reinterpret our world, and to see a, b and c as important instead, they are faced with some lose-lose choices:

Box 1) Admitting that they do not know as much about a, b and c as they did the old problems of x, y and z, and handing their privilege and power to someone else.

Box 2) Shifting their position on both x, y and z and a, b and c to reflect the new priorities which have emerged. We then publicly humiliate them for having performed a U-turn, the press characterise them as weak and confused and shortly afterwards they are forced to hand their privilege and power to someone else.

Box 3) Pretending that they don't agree with the shift in priorities and clinging to the ideas which afforded them their privilege in the first place, desperately defending the seriousness of the old problems and denying the validity of the new ones.

Nobody gets to be a politician by lacking confidence in their own 'I know better'ness, so inevitably our leaders respond to change - change which is simply a natural and unavoidable consequence of the experiment of democracy unfolding over time - by sticking with box number 3: I was right, I continue to be right, please listen to the scary things I have to say about what will happen if you don't wake up to how right I still am.

In the climate change / sociology book I'm just finishing (still) we call this "The Alpha Trap", and believe it is the source of the inevitable emergence of distance and disappointment between the leaders and the people, as well as many of the reckless and destructive actions they undertake on our behalf.

The key to reducing the negative impact The Alpha Trap has would of course be to make it easier for our leaders to open box number 2, but "open minded leader reassesses position in the light of new information and further experience" doesn't make for much of a headline.

It would also hinge upon the recognition that all societies are simply a series of experiments. The unique aspect of a democracy is that the subjects of the experiments get to influence the design of the next experiment. The difficulty we face is that our biology drives us to assume certainty, particularly in the face of danger. 'Oh, I wonder if that might be a tiger...' is not the kind of thinking which keeps a species on the rise. So, we don't like to hear about experiments with education and health care, we like our leaders to tell us that they definitely know that the new plan they are proposing will be successful. Who is more to blame, the leader who lies about their confidence or the follower who only follows leaders who lie about their confidence?

And now, suddenly, I face an even greater source of disappointment in our leaders. One I'm not sure I will ever be able to recover from. I have almost finished watching five series of The West Wing. And I want my politicians and my press to be as witty and incisive as Josh, Toby, CJ and President Bartlett.

Yesterday, Badger and I were watching Prime Minister's Questions while we ate our eggs. And Cameron accused Brown's VAT cut sales stimulus of being an 'Expensive Failure'. And I waited for someone, anyone, politician or press, to point out that a sales stimulus tax cut could be either expensive or a failure, but probably not both. And I'm still waiting.

Magical mist...

2009-01-04T23:43:00.006Z

On the last day of 2008 we went for a walk in our village in the Dales, it was really misty but we thought what the heck and then as we headed up the hill we suddenly came out the other side into glorious sunshine and took these pictures. It was like being on top of everest or something!

Scary stunts....

2008-12-13T16:12:00.007Z

On last nights local news was a strory about a Yorkshire man who had won £7 million on the Lottery.

How very lovely for him. But what made the story a real joy was that the man was a stunt actor - ohh err how terribly exciting the news crew and all the viewers must have thought.. but then..... the story was about to take a down turn.

News man: "So what kind of films or programmes have you worked on as a stunt actor, have you ever been hurt?"...
Yorkshire man: "Well I am a stunt actor for Heartbeat...."

....silence.....

Can you imagine!! a flamin stunt actor for Heartbeat, whats the most dangerous thing that ever happens in one of the dullest shows ever to be produced...

"Oh nooo, I have slipped on a rogue ham sandwhich.... quick quick call Nick Berry, these litter bugs must be shot"...
or
"Arghhh" went the scream as Mr Brown got his slacks caught in his bicycle chain..

Must be a real hairy job that, stunt acting for Heartbeat, goodness, how his wife must worry.

Badgerisms - The Musical Quiz!

2008-12-07T21:13:00.003Z

Recently Badger has been mostly ticking improvisations on popular hits.

Points will be awarded for guessing the original tune and artist. Submissions in the comments please. First prize is a signed original Badger-designed christmas card.

1) Some Badgers they love one another...

2) Don't you wish your Badger was strong like me - dontcha

3) I feel like chicken in tights

4) This could be Badger for everyone!

5) Come on feel the Badge (NOOOOO!)

6) Just grab a Badger and dance

And while you're here, if you haven't already done so please visit www.1000thingsthatmatter.com and blog it and stuff so that other people who read your blog will also kindly come and tell us what matters. Thank you muchly.

1000 things that matter

2008-12-05T16:15:00.002Z

We need your help. We're making a film and we need to know what matters to you.

So, we've just launched www.1000thingsthatmatter.com and we're keen to get 1000 entries as fast as possible.

Please spread the word :) We know you all have great ideas and lots to say... and we look forward to hearing your entries.

Go on. What are you waiting for?

Snowed in...

2008-12-04T15:36:00.003Z

I bring this to you after having a jolly good sweep of the satellite dish to gain an internet connection.

More walks of the wintery kind...

2008-11-29T15:36:00.002Z

I love that I can take pictures like this without having to get in my car....

Displacement activity

2008-11-25T17:36:00.006Z

I am still writing my article.

Here are all the very clever things I have learned in the past month......

Ant and Dec still rock
Being in possession of a pair of silicone breasts does not necessarily mean that you are not smart, sassy and witty
Cheryl Cole is as genuine as she is gorgeous and really needs to come round to our house for tea
Fat, bald men who can't dance make surprisingly good telly
Lip gloss in Russian proportions is a difficult look to pull off
Kerry Katona likes pastry

Excellent. Article coming on nicely then.

Wintery walks..

2008-11-23T18:10:00.004Z

We woke to snow and sunshine this morning, so we went for a walk up the hill behind the house.

I took my camera and this is what I found....

am I getting old, or what....?

2008-11-22T21:15:00.009Z

In 1992 I was far too busy listening to On-U Sound and marching with militant to take them seriously.

in 1996 I was far too busy being post-natally depressed to give a monkeys about their disbanding, let alone call the help-line that was set up by the Samaritans to support their distressed fans.

But in 2008 I can't help but notice how - like a cheesecake or a chili con carne - Take That are much better for having spent a short spell in the fridge.

On the 15th day of November my neighbours gave to me...

2008-11-20T15:56:00.004Z

... one Chocolate Orange and a brace of pheasants for our tea.

*ends singing*

At 6pm Badger and I are taking said brace of pheasants down to the local pub where the lovely and eccentric landlord (who used to produce Thomas the Tank Engine) will give us a demonstration of how to make them eatable. For they are not, yet. They are just hanging by the front door just as they were when they arrived. Heads, feathers, etc.

This brings us to a dilemma. We happen to live somewhere that offers a plentiful supply of free meat most of the year round. The local farmers have said we can have rabbits for free, provided we do all the yukky bits for ourselves.

Free range? *check*

Zero food miles? *check*

No carbon footprint? *check*

Low cholesterol? *check*

Cute snuffly noses and floppy ears? *check*

After much discussion we have concluded that if we aren't prepared to eat the local, free meat offered to us then we probably shouldn't eat meat at all. And, having been veggie and also done the almost-veggie-but-I-eat-fish thing, I don't want to give up meat again. We do eat veggie at least half the time, and we only buy free range meat, but that's as far as it goes.

Now, proper veggies I can respect. My little sis hasn't eaten animal bits for a long time and is very serious about it. Fishy-tarians I can also dig - there is something different about fishes, they don't have limbic systems and raise their young like other mammals... and we don't rear them in horrible battery farms. (Oh ... actually we do, but we pretend not to and can choose to buy fish responsibly).

But, it turns out that I might just be a dont-make-me-think-about-it-etarian. Which sounds to me like a synonym for 'hypocrite'. So, I searched YouTube for a video that might instruct me how to prepare a pheasant, in the hope that I might be de-sensitised by the time we go for our lesson this evening. And, OMG it's horrific. Badger and I are in pieces.

Not the blood and guts... that wasn't too bad actually.

No, much worse than that.

The video soundtrack is "You're beautiful" by James Blunt.

Some people are just twisted.

How (not) to reference

2008-11-14T19:09:00.006Z

I am currently writing an article on postmodernism (Derrida, Lyotard, Kristeva et al) and its influence on the intersubjective school of psychotherapy (Schore, Stolorow, Hargaden and Sills et al).

I am getting in a bit of a pickle (Crosse and Blackwell 1922).

Not necessarily because I worry that I don't know what I'm talking about (although that doesn't mean that I do.) The beauty of using postmodern theory is that you can fully admit to simply making up stories about the world because, ultimately, all we do is....er......simply make up stories about the world (Grimm and Grimm 1812)

My jam (Weller/Buckler/Foxton 1977) is with academic referencing.

Were I writing an article using specific theories or techniques such as the Drama Triangle (Thespis 534 BC, Euclid 300 BC) or the Script Matrix (Wachowski and Wachowski 1999) it would be straightforward enough. But when you are writing about the pervasive philosophical movements of modernity, the ownership of knowledge becomes significantly less clear.

At what point does something become part of the canon of received wisdom, I wonder? (Del Shannon 1961). Writers frequently refer to 'paradigm shifts' without referencing Thomas Kuhn's seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Is Kuhn twitching in his grave at not getting a mention?

Do I really need to reference 25 impenetrable French philosophers if I use the term postmodern?

(As a mildly amusing aside, Derrida once confirmed that a quarter of his work was impenetrable. "I am a French philosopher", he declared. "If 25% of my work was not impenetrable, nobody would take me seriously." At least I think it was Derrida, but frankly I just can't be arsed to look it up.)

I have no wish to be accused of plagiarism (Harrison 1971) so I shall err, naturally, on the side of caution and reference everything - including the kitchen sink (Osborne 1956).

There is a devil in me, though, that would love (Lennon/McCartney 1967) to just write 'Wikipedia' under the heading references.

We made a film...

2008-11-04T11:35:00.003Z

The DVD I've been working on most of this year is now ready to go to press.

This is a sneak preview - the actual DVD has seven films on different themes, so it was a little tricky to capture into just one trailer, but I think you'll get the idea.

Most of the content is aimed at professionals - therapists, MH workers, doctors, A&E staff etc.

The DVD also features a reading by Caroline Smailes and an interview about In Search of Adam, which is lovely.

I'm dead chuffed with all the people who took part - they were honest, authentic and shared in a really generous way.

If you'd like to spread the word that would be appreciated. All proceeds are going to fund services for people who self harm. DVDs are available from harmless.org.uk

Thanks to Badger and to Ms M for their efforts too - watching hour after hour of rough-cuts and never telling me they were bored...

Soooo. Um. Only say nice things please because I'm not really interested in editorial criticism at this point, with it having been finalised and all that, and I tend to take it to heart.

Doing our bit for global warming.....

2008-11-02T19:47:00.004Z

Stray brought back a little gift from her trip to Boston this summer.

Bob* is the best alarm clock I have ever had. He is shaped like a weeble (he wobbles but he doesn't fall down) and has a clever little button on his back giving you access to a variety of functions which you will soon wonder how you lived without.

Bob's timer mode is invaluable for those times when you are cooking a four-minute boiled egg whilst lying in bed. (We don't use this as often as we might, as Badger has a remarkable gift for judging the exact time an egg needs to be boiled for. She gives it a quick weigh in her hand, declares the amount of boiling it requires and then executes it with precision. Nor does she require me to get out of bed. It is one of the many reasons we will never let anyone steal away our Badger. )

Bob also has a date/year mode. I can't actually think of an occasion when I have needed to know the exact date on the moment of waking - heavens above, is today the date of the American election or is it bonfire night? - but I often wake and wonder what year it is - it's 2008: that means I am a proper grown-up and have a job to go to. Bugger.

Bob's most useful function - apart from the obvious waking-me-up-in-the-morning part - is that he tells us the temperature.

At first it was fun. Ooh, Bob says it's 15 Celsius in our bedroom. I would never have known that otherwise. Thank you lovely Bob.

Then it got serious.

On Wednesday morning Bob informed me it was 12 Celsius. It's a bit parky, said Bob. I suggest you jump straight into the shower or you'll freeze your bits off.

On Thursday morning Bob informed me it was 11 Celsius. It's more than parky, said Bob. Get dressed under the covers and forget the shower 'cos the bathroom's no warmer. No-one will ever know....oh, and by the way it's 2008 and you are a proper grown-up with a job to go to. Sorry.

On Friday morning Bob informed me it was 10 Celsius. In my bedroom. Are you completely mad, asked Bob? This is not a house, this is a milking shed. Someone has merely persuaded you it is a house with the clever addition of some windows and a kitchen. You are insane to live here. I suggest you stay in bed, call in sick and ride it out. It can only get warmer. (We know it is a milking shed, by the way, because Daddy Farmer tells us every time he sees us that he used to milk his cows in our living room.)

From November 1st landlords in the UK will be required to issue their tenants with energy efficiency certificates, assessing the property on an efficiency rating from A to G. We suspect our landlord may have to apply for a new 'H' rating, applicable only to cow sheds.

And so we are braving the arctic weather with only a log fire and some outrageously expensive night storage heaters for company. Thank heavens for n-a-p, is all I can say.

*Those of you who bothered to follow the link will note that Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought..........High School Musical? I await my Christmas present with baited breath....

On Badger Brains

2008-10-16T15:23:00.005+01:00

The climate change book is ticking along nicely. Badger has done some amazing illustrations, including these lovely frogs. She enjoyed drawing the frogs so much that she hardly ticked at all while she was working away at them.

Today we are mostly drawing brains. And I had one of those 'aha!' moments where a bunch of seemingly unconnected things suddenly came together.

Recently Badger's talent for spontaneous rhyming couplets has reached new heights. They were always tuneful and perfectly scanning, but when Badger ticked the answer to a question on University Challenge we were really impressed. The challenge was to complete the final line of a John Betjeman poem ...

Red hair she had and golden skin,

Her sulky lips were shaped for sin,

Her sturdy legs were flannel-slack'd,

The strongest legs in ...

'Pontefract!' ticked Badger.

And she was right. Badger isn't into poetry - Betjeman's charitable request for friendly bombs to fall on Slough has passed her by. So, you can imagine how astounded Ms M and I were. As was Badger - who claims that she wasn't even sure of the meaning of the word Pontefract before she ticked it out.

So. We have a Badger who knows that she is going to sing but not which words might come out, and who completes poems spontaneously with correctly scanning and rhyming vocabulary, only partially aware of the meaning of the words being used.

And then, just now, I had to sketch a diagram of the brain, separating tasks by hemisphere. This stuff isn't an exact science, we are still very wobbly on what we do know about the relationship between the mind and the brain but we've got some rough ideas. One of the most well understood areas is language - the consequences of injury to parts of the brain being particularly obvious when they manifest in speech.

Conversation requires both sides of your brain. The left-brain (the logical, reflective side) stores vocab - the appropriate words to use for things and people. The right-brain (the creative, emotional side) stores tone, cadence, accent and meaning.

Badger is clearly a right-brain dominant person. She is very creative and spends most of her time engaged in stuff which can't be simply calculated or worked out. She even does the maths for her web designs by intuition - choosing a number and then guessing how much to adjust it by (a right-brain process, where calculation is a left-brain process).

Badger's brain is positively brimming over with extra dopamine - this is what confirms her neurological diagnosis of tourettes. Her blood tests show far higher levels of this vital neurotransmitter than an average person. Our crude understanding of her tourettes is that it's a bit like spraying the inside of a computer with a fine mist of water. Everything still works but you get a lot of short circuits as well - generating activity that perhaps wasn't directly intended.

What's got me all excited is this connection:

1) Badger's brain is mostly firing on the right side when she's being all creative (which is most of the time).

2) So, any spontaneous firing is also more likely to kick off on the right side.

3) Badger says that she is aware of the urge to tic a tune, rhyme or rhythm.

4) Badger says that the actual words which emerge are a complete surprise to her. She only knows what they will be when she actually hears them out loud.

5) The words come from her left brain.

6) The words seem to be primarily selected on the basis of how they sound / fit, but are also then frequently influenced by some sort of context - just not necessarily the obvious one.

7) The choice of words may or may not be related to Badger's right-brain activity around meaning ... where no scanning / rhyming word fits the context Badger often makes one up out of bits of other words.

Badger's therapist has commented before that she doesn't believe the tics are utterly random - that they do have some meaning, at least in their selection. This is something I've observed as well, though sometimes it's harder to determine what that meaning might be than others.

And now I wish I knew more about neuroscience.

What this really illustrates though is the extent to which neurological differences such as tourettes, autistic spectrum disorder and aspergers really are primarily differences. Whether the difference turns out to be an asset or an impediment is then determined by a whole bunch of other factors, mostly environmental. I have no doubt that in the right small tribe Badger would be revered as a soothsayer or shamen. A walking 8-ball. You never know what you're gonna get next, but it's certainly not meaningless.

Oh, and I hope you like the frogs ... :)

Irrational economics

2008-09-30T10:23:00.002+01:00

I lived on the edge of the city (as in the square mile where the banking is done in London) for several years, and I can understand the peculiar fascination I feel towards the current meltdown as being heavily influenced by the general unpleasantness of having to share space and transport with so many merchant bankers.

I feel a little disappointed that I haven't finished The Survival Paradox quicker, because one of the themes running through it is the unreasonableness of the modern obsession with 'rational' economics.

Firstly, there is a difference between 'rational' and 'reasonable'. There is a wonderful 'rational' solution to the 'Fox, Chicken, Grain' puzzle, in which a farmer has to use a small boat, in which he can only transport himself and one of his cargo (fox, chicken or grain) at a time, to cross a river. Leaving the fox with the chicken, or the chicken with the grain will result in disaster. The rational solution is satisfying to work out, but the reasonable question remains: why is a farmer carrying a live fox around with him?

The number of important decisions made daily on the basis that they are rational is something that genuinely concerns me. Particularly when at its core, western rational economics has an apparently bonkers principle: compound interest.

Older civilisations recognised that compound interest wasn't viable, because while value was still linked to concrete stuff (be it gold, sheep or grain) a debt or investment subject to compound interest would one day require you to pay back more 'stuff' than there was on the earth. Which would be silly.

When we magically unlinked value from the concrete world and created the paper based currency we know as money today it was intended to be a 'promise' which could be exchanged for real gold when the time came. But even 300 years ago, over confident banks released more paper money than they could back up with gold in their vaults, assuming that the flow of gold would be so continuous that as long as their hands moved quicker than the investors' eyes then all would be well. Then there was a war and the gold supply dried up and some of the paper money became worthless.

Fearing that this might happen again, instead of passing legislation that prevented banks from issuing more paper than they had gold, in 1833 a law was passed 'guaranteeing' the value of the paper currency, so that people would continue to have confidence in it, even in times of low gold supply. (It was only passed in England and Wales, there is still no legal guarantee of bank notes in Scotland).

So - here we have a prime example of what I have been calling 'The Alpha Trap' in action. Alphas have privilege. The status of an alpha is a result of the status quo - whether that is a set of collective beliefs which holds them to be special (king, queen, priest, soothsayer) or a common understanding of today's survival problems which frames them as an appropriate solution (politicians, CEOs, football managers). So, what is the number one priority of an alpha?

Maintaining the status quo - because this is what affords them their privilege.

The Alpha Trap is particularly rife in rational economics. 'Rational' Economics is a game which relies upon most of the participants having a rough understanding of the 'rules', while a few alphas gain advantage by having a more in-depth understanding and a closer position to the levers. House prices are linked to interest rates because we believe them to be, and so on. The people who repeatedly reinforce the rules are of course those alphas who personally benefit from being able to expertly play the system. If we decided the rules were nonsense then those alphas would quickly find themselves unable to maintain their privilege.

Wouldn't that be kind of fun?

I have to admit that I am reacting to each further news bulletin promising impending doom with a little bit of glee. And also sadness, because I've read that one tenth of American families are more than 3 months in arrears with their mortgages, and I've no doubt that those people are experiencing stress and pain. What interests me though is how a government can dress up a rescue package as being for the benefit of those people when it is so clearly geared to the advantage of the financial sector. If you want to prevent families having their homes repossessed, pass a law preventing repossessions.

For global politics I can see the current crisis as wonderful and positive. Do I sound insane?

The reason for my optimism is that capitalist westerners are caught in a set of thinking where we confuse having more 'stuff' for being better people. To solve the impending Climate Change crisis we're going to have to cooperate with other societies who don't have as much 'stuff' as we do, and frankly we collectively look down upon those people because they don't have iPods. If we don't shift our attitudes rapidly then we'll see millions, even billions of people in the undeveloped world die through human-generated natural disaster during the next few decades.

So, I'm looking at the markets falling, and the banks collapsing, and the government experts backed into a corner where they finally admit that 'rational' economics isn't actually a proper science, despite all the numbers and graphs and formulas, and is really just a widely held set of beliefs ... possibly even superstitions ... and I'm excited. Because normal people are losing their faith in the status quo of rational economics, and starting to ask the question "what next?"

Introducing The Survival Paradox - Badgered up!

2008-09-24T17:18:00.003+01:00

You'd be forgiven for thinking that if something was "badgered up" it was in less than working order, but in our family it means quite the opposite.

Above is a screenshot of some Badger magic. Click here to get a pdf download of the opening gambit of the climate change book we've been working on.

Even better than a cheap vodka, it has been filtered by both the producer, Julian and the super-clever Ms Melancholy, before being passed to the ultra-talented Badger for a final 'badgering up'.

The book uses a split between the left hand page (graphics, cartoons, graphs and illustrations) and the right hand page (body text) to try to engage both sides of your brain in the discussion. Badger has whisked up the illustrations based on my rubbish approximations, and suddenly it feels like a really-really-real book.

I've still got the very ending chapters to complete. And then there will be A Big Announcement. Because something quite amazing is happening when we launch it.

We've got some very early feelers out to publishers - so far it's quite positive, but if you happen to own a massive publishing company and want this book then do feel free to email ;) We are also considering web-publishing via something like Lulu, because it would allow us to keep it available all over the world, and not get buried in the normal distribution and territory issues. There will be a significant web presence because of the Very Exciting Secret Thing, so one more click to order the book doesn't feel like a barrier.

So - please feel free to download this taster, and email me or comment here if you have feedback. (Especially typos ... as nmj and Cas both know first hand, there is no such thing as perfect).

The book is designed to be accessible to bright 13-year-olds as well as non-academic adults. It's wide ranging in the content - animal behaviour, neurobiology, psychology, sociology, economics, climate science, philosophy, politics - so the assumption is that no reader is an expert in all those areas, but that every reader has first-hand experience of being a human being.

The latest title, by the way, is The Survival Paradox: Why Global Climate Change has a Silver Lining.

PS I have Aspergers....

2008-09-21T14:45:00.005+01:00

Badger and Stray are watching Chelsea vs Man United. I am cooking Sunday lunch.

Lovely smell, says Stray.

Kuszczak? asks Badger, a little bewildered. (The Man United substitute goalkeeper had just been brought on to replace the injured Van der Sar.)

No, says Stray, the lamb. I can't quite smell Kuszczak from here.

I thought that was a bit odd, says Badger.....

....because I can only smell Van der Sar.

Badger, who has synaesthesia, is astonished that the rest of us can't smell people on the tele.

Van der Sar smells faintly of stale urine (Badger is a Chelsea fan after all); Joanna Lumley 'absolutely stinks' (of perfume, Ms Lumley); Gordon Brown smells musty, and there are some people who smell so much that Badger just can't watch them.

Badgerism of the day

2008-09-19T20:31:00.001+01:00

In very serious musical theatre style, we just were treated to:

Come to the western side of town ...

Where there's a badger in a crown!

Good problems to have

2008-09-18T22:11:00.002+01:00

Last week, when I was on a tube train in Boston, I spluttered and coughed my way through a bit of slow burn asthma, explaining to the tallest member of Team Geek that my server was overloaded by the Black Boxes widget, and that I didn't normally cough this much but I wasn't used to the pollution.

Wow said he. You have some really great problems right now: you can't breathe because you're not normally exposed to pollution, and you're outta bandwidth because your viral went ... viral.

A great insight.

These are really, really good problems to have. Thank you universe.

25000 hits today. Widget displayed 9000 times since last night. 600 new choices / blog entries. 15000 mystery blogs visited by blackboxers. Wow.

While I was sleeping ...

2008-09-16T10:12:00.003+01:00

.. the number of registered Black Boxes blogs and pairs of choices they've submitted soared over the 2500 mark.

While I was under the duvet, snoozing off my jet lag, over 6000 calls to the server were made by more than 1000 different people Blackboxing.

At least 3000 visits to a mystery (but not random - it's all based on your choices) blog were generated by the widget.

It is now installed on more than 300 blogs - maybe many more (I can't be more precise because the log files are so huge that I can only analyse 12 hour snapshots until I get the abridged one at the end of the month).

Thank you to everybody who has said lovely things about the widget ... and about me. I have to re-thank the other members of team-geek for incredible work in scaling it up to cope with the staggering enthusiasm of the blogging community. They rocked my binary world.

I should also thank Caroline, firstly for giving me the opportunity to do a lovely widget for her, but also for putting her complete trust in me, as I only had a couple of days to execute it which left little space for tweaking. The team at TFP were similarly brave in giving me the go ahead even though I'd only written a few sentences in description in an email.

My big question when Caroline and I hatched the idea was will people 'get' it? I can't believe how many people totally get it.

For me, the embracing of blackboxing (omg I love that it has a verb, and corresponding nouns "blackboxer/ee") is more than just a pat on the back for having made something fun. As a geek I have always found it painful that other people didn't always see the internet as real life. Many times I've had people ask me "yeah ... but what about relationships in real life?" ... as if somehow the bits of me that blogged and forumed (new verb, I like) and g-chatted weren't really alive.

Newsflash: It's all real. It's all us. And, whether it was a tiny seed of change or a dramatic revelation, last night, while I was sleeping, the Black Boxes widget and the bloggers who've embraced it, changed someone's life.

This episode of chasing-sheep was brought to you by the letters POST and GET and the numbers 1 and 0.

Go team geek!

2008-09-14T16:46:00.004+01:00

It was the moment I had been dreading since the day the Black Boxes widget was embraced with such enthusiasm. I fired up chasing sheep and instead of a Black Box there was a black hole. The server was out of bandwidth due to the amount of data passing back and forth between 'blackboxers', who were doubling every 30 hours and then faster and faster.

By a stroke of luck the tipping point occurred late on Friday (US time - fortunately the UK were asleep) and I just happened to be hanging out with a whole troop of alpha-geeks in one of our hotel rooms in Boston.

There was a flurry of clunks and swooshes as the laptops opened. We were living the alpha-geek dream: an emergency that genuinely required the application of the obscurest titbits of knowledge we collectively possessed. The clock was ticking and we were ready to save the day.

At first glance the answer had to be simple. After all, it's a pretty straightforward little widget - how hard could it be to find the right blog to send people to based on their choices? But no ... this particular puzzle held a lot more complexity than you could ever imagine. And, for an ordinary person, that would have been a disappointment. Luckily, for an alpha-geek the fact that your first three ideas are nowhere close to a solution is what makes it really start to feel like fun.

5 alpha-geeks, one beta-geek (self-termed and behind the camera), one designer / technical editor and a project manager. Go team geek!

We divided up the tasks and tested various theories. We implemented a fast-fix that we knew would only hold out for a couple of hours, and then we combined our collective problem solving capability and worked out a beautiful solution. I hacked a temporary version of it that we could have up and running that night, and the boys put together an amazing super-charged-version that will take over this week, and means that the widget will be able to handle up to 100 users per minute.

We tapped keyboards, opened terminals, installed stuff, researched stuff, tested, failed, tested, failed better, tested, failed even better and then, at 4.30 am Boston time, we uploaded our solutions and congratulated ourselves on having saved the day. (Or possibly just the widget, but hey, we geeks have egos too and we rarely excel at the heavy lifting stuff).

I can't thank my fellow geeks enough. They totally blew me away - partly with their sheer brilliance but mostly with their complete commitment to finding a solution. They rocked.

Missing Stray......

2008-09-13T00:24:00.008+01:00

Boxers look depressed at the best of times. Here is a Boxer who is missing her mummy.

Now tell me you don't feel just a bit sad?

This summer I have been mostly.....

2008-09-12T08:02:00.008+01:00

...playing mum....

...to our Badger and her broken paw...

...and her sicky-vomity bug.....

...and Stray and her sicky-vomity bug....

...and Master M because...well...I am his mum after all...(not to mention the sicky-vomity bug)

...but mostly to this little nest of swallows on our bedroom balcony.

Frank, Badger's pet ~~killing machine~~ ginger tom, thinks we have opened up a take-away. And so at 5am each morning, at the start of the morning feeding regime, I have been on the balcony shooing away the ~~killing machine~~ little darling to try and preserve the lives of our swallow family. And yes, I did say 5am. Every morning. For 6 weeks.

Alas, I fear that I have failed in my task. The babies visited the balcony every day after fledging....and then there were only two. I think I found the remains of baby number three on our bathroom floor. To be fair to Frank he had eaten most of it. Waste not want not is Frank's motto.

I think the swallows have finally tired of the Yorkshire rain and left with their friends for sunnier climes.

And presumably to tell the African cats tales of the strange tiny ginger tiger that lives on our balcony.

While the cat's away...

2008-09-09T22:37:00.005+01:00

Stray is currently in the States, talking grown-up talk with publishers.

Badger, Master M and I were idling away the evening wondering what particular kinds of naughtiness we could get up to whilst she is away.

Let's watch Nigella whilst we eat, said Badger. Yay!

It's not that Stray disapproves of eating in front of the tele. It's just that - along with perfect pitch and a photographic memory - Stray has this weird 'perfect taste' thing going on. She can't eat whilst watching cookery programmes as she can taste whatever they are cooking, as well as whatever she is eating. It's a bummer.

And so we ate our pudding in front of Nigella for the first time ever - Badger with a pot of Ben and Jerry's Phish Food and me and Master M with a Muller Crap-Corner.

Boy, do we know how to enjoy ourselves.

Badger was slightly perturbed at Nigella's unique presenting style.

Why is she gyrating round the table? exclaimed a bewildered Badger. She's postively fornicating!

She's not quite fornicating, Badger, said I.

What exactly is fornicating? said Badger.

Look it up, said I.

No good will come of this, sighed Master M. He is 13 years old. He knows precisely what fornicating is.

Badger googles fornicating.

Well that's not Badger-friendly! exclaims a shocked Badger.

Indeed not. Nigella fornicating around the kitchen table is most definitely not Badger-friendly.

I imagine Stray is missing us quite a lot.

Tourettes marketing...

2008-09-09T12:54:00.004+01:00

Creating awareness and challenging common myths created by the media is difficult for the Tourettes Association. This is my attempt at a little marketing for them...

Black Boxes...

2008-09-08T18:20:00.006+01:00

Clever Stray has made a very beautiful and clever blog widget based on how different choices can effect your path in life - the theme of Caroline's new novel, Black Boxes - and we hope you'll join in by taking part. You must make a series of choices and then you will be taken to a mystery blog of another person taking part who picked similar answers to you.... who knows where your answers may lead! You can also put the Black Boxes widget on to your own blog.

If you decide to do that, here are the instructions:

For blogger - there are 2 styles of templates, old style and new style. To add the widget to a non-blogger template, follow the old style instructions.

If you don't know what kind of template you have then you probably have new style!

To add the widget to a new style blog template:

Log in to your blog. Go to "Layout". Choose "Page Elements". Choose to "Add a page element" in your side bar. Choose "HTML / Javascript" as the type of element. Give your new element a title, and into the content area paste exactly the green code below (only the green stuff). You can write text above and below it if you like, but the whole of the green stuff must be in there, intact.

To add the widget to an old style blog template:

Go to your template. Insert the green code in the area which defines your sidebar. Feel free to email me (Badger - as Stray is now away in distant lands creating other magical things!) if you have problems.

----

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Things I have noted whilst mostly sitting....

2008-09-03T23:46:00.003+01:00

My rucksack has never had so much use... nor has the Wii. I have Gold in every cup in every CC in Mario Kart! I use my rucksack for carrying all manner of things now, from Tea, to cauliflower cheese, to books and warm potatoes.

My toes have been exposed to fresh air for the longest amount of time in my entire life, I have never really seen them before. I still hate feet though. I will not let this cure me of my foot fear, and I do wear my toe sock if I feel any slight breeze in the air. My toes are way too long its distressing.

I miss my bike - but I don't miss the burn in my legs from the hills. I miss swimming more....

I feel guilty for being lazy and think that maybe I should be hoping up and down the village at least once a day, not to mention somehow helping around the house.

My right leg is some what skinnier than my left now. I look unbalanced. It is heading toward becoming a bird leg. Like a sparrow or finch you understand, not a girly bird leg.

I know I am bored and obsessing when the highlight of my day was that the number10.gov website used BADGER as their e-petition example name.

In other dull and broken news:-
I can not believe the Caravan club have not responded to my ~~hate~~ email. Unless of course their ISP works as quickly as their drivers, in which case it will arrive in my inbox some time next spring with a thousand others stuck behind it.

Knitting a widget

2008-09-02T14:54:00.001+01:00

'Tis amazing what you can make out of numbers.

I am stirring all my numbers and letters in a big pot, and when they have baked for long enough something exciting will emerge.

Not long now ...

pushing an elephant up the stairs.....

2008-08-29T22:16:00.003+01:00

Stray is working on the last two chapters of the climate change book. The one-last-heave philosophy is taking its toll.

Its 9pm, and she has been working on it most of the day.

Stray: I need a nap. Can you wake me in an hour?

Ms M: 40 minutes is the optimum time for a power nap. Any longer than that and you go into REM.

Stray: And then what happens?

Ms M: ....pauses....there's a joke here somewhere if only I can find it.......

You wake up singing impenetrable lyrics, inspired by Durkheim and relevant only to sociology students.

Stray: Shit. What happens if I sleep for two hours?

Ms M: You go into Coldplay.

Stray: And?

Ms M: You wake up either wanting to slit your wrists or sing songs about saving humanity, or sing songs about saving humanity that make the rest of us want to slit our wrists.

Stray: And if I sleep all night?

Ms M: You go into U2......and wake up with a narcissistic disorder and I have to kill you.*

Stray: Wake me up after just the 40 minutes then.

* Q: What's the difference between Bono and God?

A: God doesn't walk down Grafton Street thinking he's Bono.

the songs of love and joy......

2008-08-22T23:05:00.006+01:00

Badger has a unique form of Tourettes Syndrome, according to her neurologist.

She has mostly singing tics, which come in a variety of forms. Sometimes she will replace key lyrics from songs with the words Badger or shmaow eg. I'm In The Mood for Schmaowing. Much more fun the The Nolan Sisters' original, I'm In The Mood For Dancing, although we have yet to work out exactly what it is to schmaow.

Sometimes she has a kind of singing echoalia, where she repeats your words but adds a tune of her own (eg Master M, put your laptop away!)

Badger's most recent singing tics, however, have made us smile the most. She is singing a kind of musical-theatre-style libretto to accompany any activity, complete with over-articulated-consonants and desperately-earnest-tone. The songs of love and joy, we call them, mostly because of the many references to love and/or joy. (eg the potatoes of love! at a particularly delicious batch of potato wedges served up by Stray.)

If you were at a Cameron Mackintosh production, you might want to poke your own eyes out. In the context of your own dinner table, however, it is much more amusing than I can begin to describe. Badger's tics fill us all with love and joy.

We have had a very sad little Badger since she broke her right paw, raving at our neighbour's house. She had a little sing in the ambulance on the way to the hospital (Just Grab a Badger, and Dance to the tune of Let's Face The Music and Dance, much to the amusement of the paramedic). And then the singing stopped. No more songs of love and joy. No more musical theatre Tourettes style.

Mario Kart and Master M are playing a critical part in Badger's recovery. Master M is happy for any excuse to be glued to the sofa with a controller in his hand, although Badger says that watching me play Mario Kart is marginally more painful than her broken ankle. Apparently I play 'like a mum', just because I don't think it's big or clever to overtake on a blind bend.

We are hoping for a swift recovery. Life just isn't the same without the songs of love and joy.

A broken Badger...

2008-08-17T20:02:00.003+01:00

Following on with Strays theme...

It takes roughly 5 pints of ale and 2 seconds to break your paw... oh, and some sort of techno induced dancing!

It takes one strong farmer to carry the broken Badger home over his shoulder...

It takes a very stubborn Badger to refuse all help for hours until such time as needing the upstairs toilet and being unable to crawl up the stairs without screaming in pain... which alerted my rescue operation by Stray and Ms M.

It takes gas and air on board a long ambulance trip to make a Badger talk even more nonsense than she was on just the beer...

Yes... you guessed it I have broken my ankle/foot dancing at a post pub house party in the village (who would have thought!) it is actually my fifth metatarsal I have fractured I believe to be precise. Ms Mmmm and Stray have been looking after me very well indeed. I will be in plaster for 6-8 weeks. Owie.

I also have not ticced any songs about love or joy since. It would seem that sad Badgers do not tic happy songs. Goodbye West End theatre Tourettes style. :(

Badger love...

2008-08-14T22:09:00.001+01:00

Is it possible my liking for Badgers is bordering on obsessive.... ?

It takes 18 minutes ...

2008-08-10T18:49:00.007+01:00

for the local voluntary fire service to reach our village.

Dogs can detect fire much faster than people.

Bank statements burn at a particularly high temperature.

Having your chimney swept yearly is an excellent way to prevent chimney fires.

The fire-brigade are very lovely chaps and chappesses who do a fantastic job.

13-year-old boys are not overly impressed by the idea of a ride in a fire engine.

When you live in a remote rural community the emergency services dispense with the normally lengthy interrogation and get on with dispatching help to you.

Ruby never barks without good reason.

Neighbours may piss themselves laughing when you pop down the pub to tell them that the fire brigade are headed for your house and not theirs, but this is just their way of showing support. They will later offer tea / beds / help cleaning up. (Not required but appreciated).

The fire service will fit 10-year smoke alarms before they leave.

Discussing whether it is the landlord's responsibility to have the chimney swept does not prevent a chimney fire.

Ruby will be getting a very large bone tomorrow.

Rearrange the statements above to work out what our Saturday night was like.

Wuthering Heights and all that....

2008-08-05T22:14:00.006+01:00

People say strange things to you when you move to the back of beyond.

What do you do with yourselves? (Answer: mostly we chase the sheep.)

Don't you get bored? (Answer: only when the sheep won't play out.)

Isn't it just really miserable when it rains?

I find this last one hard to understand. I have lived in various places around the country and none of them have attracted me because of the marvelous way they just come alive when it pisses down. Hackney, inner city Manchester and the suburbs of Bradford deserve a particular mention for their capacity to induce suicidal feelings after days of endless British drizzle.

Tonight it has been drizzling, or mizzling, as we say around these parts, which is a particularly persistent form of drizzling. I couldn't watch tele because we had no reception. I couldn't listen to the radio because we had no reception. I couldn't surf the web because we had no internet connection. I couldn't chase the sheep because they won't play in the rain.

In the absence of any other amusement I sat on the balcony and watched the mist roll round the tops of the hills before meandering aimlessly down into the valley. The sheep were tucked sensibly behind the walls, and the mizzle was mizzling for Yorkshire.

It was bleak. It was dour, grim, stark and forbidding all at the same time. It was positively Wuthering Heights, if Wuthering Heights were an adjective. I couldn't think of any place I would rather be.

In a not-at-all-clunky-or-contrived link, there is plenty of Wuthering-Heights-induced excitement around these parts at the moment.

The local news reported this week that George Clooney and Johnny Depp are in the area, for yet another remake. A quick google search indicates that La Jolie, Natalie Portman and/or Sienna Miller are also involved. That's the local B & B full up then, unless the girls decide to bunk up together in which case you might get a room if you book quickly.

A film crew in the neighbouring village, however, turned out to be filming the new ITV adaptation of Wuthering Heights. I am fond of Sarah Lancashire, but Angelina Jolie she is not.

Stray wouldn't let me ask the film crew if anyone famous was hanging around (Ms M, please, no....) or even what they were filming (I said no!) or if they needed any extras (at this point she started to rock.) She used to be on the tele-box, so is way cooler than me when it comes to meeting famous people.

I have, however, discovered that Jean-Luc Picard lives about five miles away. Don't tell Stray, but I think I can track him down. I have the sheep on the case.

The first crop...

2008-08-01T14:13:00.005+01:00

Today I dug up my potatoes! This is the first time I have attempted to grow them and I was not optimistic.... but then I started digging and joy upon joy I discovered proper potatoes down in the dirt, like real ones from a shop.. woo.

Any one for adrenaline?

2008-07-31T11:02:00.005+01:00

On Saturday evening I opened the back door to grab some dog food from the big metal bin we keep it in and heard a funny rasping noise in the field behind the house. I looked up and saw that one of the tups was rubbing himself against the wire fence and sort of coughing. He was also foaming a bit around the mouth. These particular tups are mostly Leicesters and they're not known for surviving ailments. I rushed back in to find Badger, hoping that her agricultural college days might have instilled some knowledge about sheep-coughing.

She dutifully came to give a second opinion and suggested that perhaps he was dehydrated, and I should go and take a closer look. Suddenly he bolted, running for about five meters before he was restrained by the yellow hose-pipe which was tied around his neck. I have no idea how but this fellow had managed to not just loop the hose around his neck but actually tie a proper knot in it as well.

Most of the rams around here have horns and you'd be foolish to get into a croft with one that might be unhappy, but Leicesters are horn-free and very friendly, so it was only out of fear that he might take fright and choke himself further that I decided not to hop the fence and try to get it off myself. Instead I legged it to the farm where I found the farmer and his family having a BBQ, and so it was only a couple of minutes before the farmer was in the field sorting it out. Phew. He said that there's no doubt that the Tup wouldn't have survived much longer. I kept expecting Michael Buerk's voice to cut in with some dramatic cliches.

Ms M thinks I am disproportionately invested in the well-being of critters (though I'm not averse to them ending up on my plate with some roast potatoes). I was rather worked up about the near-strangling of the Tup, but assumed I'd had my adrenaline for the weekend. This was not to be the case.

On Sunday night little Ruby had a run in with an over zealous farm dog up the road. Ruby was largely oblivious to the gaping hole in the top of her leg, which was quickly doused in sheep wound treatment (the dog's owner is a Defra vet) before we rushed her to the emergency vets. Ms M did a stirling job of maintaining a decent speed over the tops in the dusk while somehow avoiding the dozens of suicidal sheep, rabbits, baby lapwings and even a proper hare who threw themselves into our path.

The vets were wonderful (with me, as I was in a far worse state than Ruby), patched her up temporarily and dispatched us with antibiotics. On Tuesday Ruby had a procedure done to take away the bits of skin that weren't going to be viable and fix the whole thing up. The interim period was interesting, but I'll spare you the gory details.

So. Tuesday was already an event filled day. Ruby has a heart murmur which means that sedative is to be avoided, but luckily she's very compliant so she got through her little op with just a local. The vets claim she was as good as gold. I believe them but suspect that if they'd had to kneel on her head to get her to stop wiggling then they might not tell me anyway.

During all this I'd been doing a very good job of patiently waiting for news about The Triangle Book. I'd submitted my audition last Thursday, expecting to hear back late on Friday. I am not good at waiting under the best of circumstances. By Monday night I was pretty much rocking.

Now, I know that for many of you, the idea of writing a 500 page text book on geometry is strangely less than appealing. But for me, this is the holy grail. This publisher write the best learning books I've come across. I love their books, most of which are best sellers in their class. I don't know how to communicate what this means to me ... it's like coming up with an idea for a chocolate bar and being asked to produce it by Cadburys.

Anyway, on Tuesday night I finally got the nod. As in, yes, they think they want me to do it! Eek! So, in about 2 weeks time I'm off to the US for a few days for some training.

I enjoyed doing my audition chapter so much that I can hardly stop jumping about with excitement at the idea of doing the whole book. It's my idea of heaven.

It feels like a really important project. Geometry (and algebra, because frankly you can't do geometry without it) is so pure and beautiful. Plus, Master M is going to rock at this stuff by the time I'm done. If I do it right it will help millions of people to grasp the fundamentals of mathematics for many years to come. How cool is that?

There are still a couple of steps in the process to come. And I'm still in the final stages of the climate change book - we keep getting 90% done and then moving the goal posts at the moment. I'm on second draft of the first 80% though, which feels good.

I should take a moment here to thank Badger, who came up with the idea that I should contact the publisher and offer my services. And also for her excellent artwork on my audition. Badger is part of the appeal to the publisher - the fact that I have a designer who is so well suited to doing the fancy bits is perfect. We're really a package deal, so I hope she's feeling pleased about it too, even if the square-root signs make her feel a bit sick ...

In other exciting news, nmj's book The State of Me has dispatched from Amazon today! Ms M and I will be fighting over it this weekend no doubt ...

A Wallaby and a Hedgehog..

2008-07-30T13:26:00.004+01:00

Whilst I was posting the picture of the Hedgepig yesterday evening, he returned by the back door. Ms M kindly gave him a plate of cat biscuits, and Wallaby Cat thinking it rude to leave our guest eating alone joined in.

Today in the Dales...

2008-07-29T21:12:00.003+01:00

This young Hedgepig came to visit yesterday.. and how odd that as I write this he is at the back door paying another visit.

Surely that won't sell ... ?

2008-07-26T21:17:00.004+01:00

Bold fabric conditioner have released a new fragrance: White Diamond and Lotus Flower.

As diamond is a famously hard and chemically unreactive substance which, it follows, has no smell, Ms Melancholy and Badger have concluded that the name was mixed up at the last moment.

Why anyone would want their washing to smell of cheap cider, vomit and their mother's Charlie is beyond us.

P.S. in more random TV bloggage, Ms M dreamt last night that Andy Peters - former darling of children's TV who is currently ~~irritating the life out of us~~ impressing us all on Celebrity Masterchef - was awarded an OBE for 'Services to Goose Fat'. Analyse that.

Synergies

2008-07-24T13:20:00.004+01:00

In the last couple of weeks I have been working on two writing projects which couldn't be more diverse.

On the one hand, The Survival Paradox is about the inevitability of the human struggle to balance short-term self-interest against long-term community-interests. It is about what makes the issue of Global Climate Change so challenging: not the technical aspects but the social aspects. The barriers to saving our planet are all socially constructed, existing solely within our collective imagination. There is no Rational Economics, there is no Nation State, there is no spoon...

The Survival Paradox is about our felt-truths. Felt-truths are the rules and meanings about the world which we have gathered in a sensible attempt to reduce the chaos and uncertainty which we experience. The fact that they are so effective, and so affective, does not make them true. The only real truth lies in mathematics and science, and it exists as ratios; the world beyond numbers.

(Our number system is social constructed - there is nothing special about the number ten unless you choose to count in tens).

Truth does not have units of measurement. It does not come in pounds or dollars.

Truth comes in circles and triangles, and little else.

The Survival Paradox is a search for the truth, which is that there is little truth in our world. This statement is itself a meta-narrative and thus a Liar's Paradox. It is an attempt at truth with continuous doubt; a book that seeks to prove the fact that almost nothing can be proved. *sigh*

No wonder I am tired. Envigorated and utterly grateful to have been on this journey, but exhausted.

The other writing project is my audition chapter for a deal to write a book about geometry. It is exclusively about triangles, circles and ratios. It seeks to help the reader find the proofs for themselves.

Yin yang, and all that jazz.

Wii are a familii

2008-07-15T20:13:00.003+01:00

From left to right: Badger, Ms M, Stray and Master M.

There is absolutely no truth in any rumour that we have spent this evening making wii-miis of everybody from blog-land. None at all.

More photos...

2008-07-10T19:36:00.004+01:00

I am not wanting to bore anyone with my photos.... its just I was quite proud of these ones I took today and I wanted to share them. Ms M and Stray will be back with wise words very soon I am sure, but for now you get my pictures of the Dales.

Wet Dales..

2008-07-10T09:07:00.005+01:00

Its wet and showery up here, but a good opportunity to take pictures of angry sky's, however it required great patience waiting for that rare sun burst to brighten the foreground.

Dear Daz... (Proctor & Gamble)

2008-07-07T21:30:00.001+01:00

I am messaging you after my distress at your intrusional TV advertisement.
I feel disturbed and disgusted since witnessing it for a number of reasons, mainly its sexual connotations with such vile characters clearly portraying British pervness. When I saw your advert all I could think of was filth. Is this your way of encouraging us to wish to be clean? I feel that you should know that your advert is disturbing and would never encourage me to buy your washing powder. I suggest you sever all ties with your Marketing strategists.

Regards
Badger

Ps. I have aspergers.

Stop Press: new title

2008-07-03T10:44:00.004+01:00

Following mixed responses to the previous title, the new question is: Would you buy a book called

The Survival Paradox

What makes the threat of Global Climate Change the greatest opportunity ever presented to the human race?

The Survival Paradox is a two-dimensional tension: the needs of the individual versus the needs of the group, and the best solution in the moment versus the best solution in the long-term. In short, The Survival Paradox is: 'me, now' versus 'all of us, in the future'.

I'm working with the book's originator today. He is over in the UK about to go on holiday, and we've just done a scary restructuring exercise. It feels absolutely positive but also reminds me of the process of moving a large, semi-complete lego construction from the dining table as a child. I sort of know that if I'm careful enough and steady enough then it will be fine but it feels hazardous all the same.

What if I drop it?

Words and pictures

2008-07-02T15:55:00.002+01:00

44,000 / 80,000 words done in the Global Climate Change book. At points it has been more, but these feel like 44,000 good words. It's quick now. I think and think but when I write it's rapid. 1500 words an hour at top speed.

The neuroscience stuff I've been learning has really helped. It feels solid now. Like a book made of triangles.

Speaking of books made of triangles, the textbook-publishing-people loved my idea for my 'audition chapter' for the-best-book-about-triangles-ever-written. They actually said LOVE. In capitals. I had presented one main idea and two backups. They said 'don't worry about the backup ideas, the first idea is PERFECT.' In capitals.

Isn't that lovely?

This company has a great track record for best sellers. When I was nine I had a wonderful teacher called Mr Long. He was a hippy. He had long hair and a beard and he sat at his desk strumming on his guitar all day. He had time for every one of us. It was before the national curriculum, in the days when learning didn't mean ticking boxes. He taught us in small groups, according to our interests and strengths. Mr Long taught me and two other children all about triangles. Sin and Cos and Tan and Pythagorus. He told my parents that one day I would be a writer.

I am rather taken with the idea of writing a best seller about triangles.

I would dedicate it to Mr Long.

I would've called it a wasted weekend, had I not felt such a sense of achievement...

2008-06-30T07:35:00.008+01:00

I am a psychotherapist, for those of you who don't keep up. Stray is an engineer*.

(That bit is relevant, honest.)

This weekend, Stray ~~nicked~~ took up my place at a workshop on neuroscience: a Jungian perspective on the mind-brain relationship and it's implications for clinical practice.

Not to be outdone, I embarked upon an engineering project of some considerable challenge. **

Stray learnt lots and lots of clever things and is developing some rather complex ideas about how our neurobiology informs the wider socio-political development, as part of her book on Climate Change. I am guessing that she made an enthusiastic and knowledgeable participant, despite being the only non-clinician in the workshop.

I am not impressed. That ain't nothing, I tell you, compared to the skill it required to get my techno-balls a-rolling-baby.

*and software developer/film-maker/writer......

**Techno-Balls: Hi-tech perpetual-motion power-driven marble run. Age 8 upwards.

Frank the hunter....

2008-06-26T12:26:00.003+01:00

Frank the ginger cat thinks he is in Heaven since moving to the Dales, the rest of the wildlife think Satan has moved to the village.

After all his constant whining in the car for the entire 6 hour journey up I hope he can now agree I only had his best interests at heart.... and if he doesn't - well we are NEVER moving again, that journey was pure hell, for the entire length of the M1 I was trying to think of ways I could strap him to the roof to get away from his shouting. Such a small cat can really produce an incredible sound.

Since our arrival in the winter months Frank still found plenty of birds and small mammals to kill. But now spring has arrived many new unsuspecting animals are being born and Frank can simply take his pick. So far he has brought in - Birds (the rarer the better it would seem), Shrews, Mice, Voles, and Frogs.

However one early summery morning last week he brought in something new, the story goes something like this: -
It's early morning. The birds are twittering and there is the faint distant sound of the cows mooing their way to the milk shed.
Master Melancholy's voice is calm but slightly uncertain: "Mum ... there's a decapitated rabbit on the bath mat."
He doesn't sound surprised.
Ms M: "Ok, don't worry ... I'm getting up ... get on with getting ready and I'll wake Badger to clear it up."
Master Melancholy: "I can't. I can't be in there. It's staring at me."
Ms M (slightly irritated): "How can it be staring at you if it's decapitated?"
Master Melancholy: "Its head is sitting next to its body."

Upon entering the bathroom as brave as any early rising Badger could be I did the blurry eye trick* and dealt with the mess young Frank had left us. We started to wonder what on earth he could bring in next. And then we found out the very next afternoon.

It all began with Ruby behaving most strangely, whining in an extremely unusual fashion. She is sitting at the bathroom door, seriously unsettled. Then Frank is spotted sitting proudly on the bath mat, guarding the curled up body of a weasel.
What next!? Will he drag a small lamb in from the fields? I have already seen him stalking pheasants that are 3 times his size

*The blurry eye trick is perfect for dealing with anything that makes you feel sick. You simply defocus your eyes so the subject that you are dealing with is not so,... ummm in your face and deal accordingly. It can be used for all manner of pet offences.

Why oh why?

2008-06-21T15:05:00.003+01:00

I'm wrestling with the neurobiology stuff within the Climate Change book. I've never quite been satisfied with the model that was in the skeletal draft, and pursuing a more detailed and robust understanding has led me to a bit of a philosophical biggie.

So, if you'll indulge me for just a moment, I'll romp about in some neurobiology, a bit of morality, a dash of sociology and some logic and philosophy, and hopefully we'll get to something that makes some sense, or something that clearly makes no sense and can be abandoned.

****

It all got a bit long so I've put it in another post back-dated so it doesn't take over the front page. Click here to read it. I'm afraid it's about 1500 words ... but any feedback is seriously appreciated!

The joy of transference

2008-06-17T08:12:00.001+01:00

Two things have happened this weekend. Two entirely inconsequential things, in the course of a whole lot of other entirely inconsequential things. They are so inconsequential that I may be in danger of winning a Blogging That Scrapes The Barrel Award. (Surely someone has built a little widget for that by now? And if not, why not?)

Inconsequential event #1

Shopping on Saturday morning, in our local (20-minute drive away) Spar. The fact that we are shopping at the Spar, and not the local (30-minute drive away) Booths means that this is a 'small' shop and not a 'proper' shop.

"A bottle of diet coke?" I ask Stray, holding up a small bottle. What I really mean to say is "do you want this small bottle of coke to drink whilst we walk Ruby?" but this is implied rather than said.

"Okay" she replies, though what she actually means is "what I would really like is one of the big bottles so I can have coke all weekend, given that this is the only remaining bad habit from my misspent youth. However, I know that you disapprove of this ethically-corrupt multi-national polluting the environment with their over-production of plastic containers, so I'll just take the small one. Also, this is a 'small' shop and not a 'proper' shop, so perhaps I can buy a large bottle next time we go to Booths."

For the record, Stray has never been in trouble with me for buying a large bottle of diet coke.

We buy the small bottle.

Saturday evening. I cook.

"Diet coke?" I ask her.

"We don't have any", she replies wistfully.

Inconsequential event #2

Saturday evening. I am cooking. I am picking absent-mindedly at a bowl of nuts whilst making a tomato salad. I am in a quiet reverie, listening to Roy Harper.

I hear the kitchen door open and it surprises me. It surprises me so much that I drop the nuts and my hand starts to shake. I wait for Stray to shout at me for picking at food whilst I am cooking.

For the record, Stray has never shouted at me for picking at nuts whilst I am cooking.

*******

Stray has an unconscious expectation that she can't have what she wants.

I have an unconscious expectation that I will be punished for......well, to be honest, for pretty much anything.

Such is the power of transference. Those blueprints for relating that we learn in childhood and carry with us throughout our life; that set of organising principles that informs the way we both respond to and initiate contact with others.

We behave as if the thing that we unconsciously expect to happen is already happening. And somehow we end up sort-of making it happen. Such is the paradox of transference. The thing that we most fear is the thing that we end up recreating.

It's not rocket science. And yet this is precisely the 'thing' that generates the most debate within different therapeutic modalities.

Should we or should we not pay attention to the transference within the therapeutic relationship?

is the question that arises time and time again between cognitive and analytic therapies.

Should we understand and challenge our belief systems, in accordance with cognitive-behavioural principles, or should we re-experience and transform them, in accordance with analytic-relational principles.

It seems to me that we have little option. Transference is neither a choice nor a disease. We cannot avoid it and we don't catch it: it simply happens. Mostly it will be inconsequential. Stray survived her lack of diet coke, and I was fine once my hand had stopped shaking.

It did serve to remind me just why I am a relational therapist, however.

You couldn't make it up #2

2008-06-16T20:45:00.008+01:00

Sunday morning breakfast.

Red Hot Chili Peppers' Californication* becomes Badger-fornication.

Badger was most upset: fornication is definitely not Badger-Friendly, she informed us.

She was significantly more upset when we pointed out that to fornicate does not mean to dance in a provocative manner.

*Sung to the tune of California Dreaming, as an extra tic-twist.

You couldn't make it up

2008-06-14T23:22:00.005+01:00

Friday night.

Four hour round trip in the dog-bus, from the peaceful sheep-sanctuary of our village to the thriving metropolis of Manchester to take our places in the audience of the Britain's Got Talent Live Tour.

Badger's latest tic comprises singing popular songs, but replacing a key word in the lyrics with either "Badger" or "Schmaow".

Badger's repertoire is really quite impressive, and we particularly enjoyed:

Boney M's seventies favourite: By the river of Badgerlon.

The Nolan Sisters' wedding classic: I'm in the mood for Schmaowing.

Tears for Fears's stadium fillers: Schmaow, Schmaow, let it all out, and Schmaowing the seeds of love.

and Rod Stewart's poke-your-eyes-out lyrical masterpiece: We are badgers, we are badgers ...

The return journey was mostly Disney themed, and a high point was reached when Badger pulled off a wonderful impression of Angela Lansbury (aka Miss Marple, a classic Type B Badgerism) as the teapot in Beauty and the Badger.

The Britain's Got Talent Show was actually rather good, and only a little bit less entertaining than four hours in a car with Badger.

You make your own jam

2008-06-11T22:59:00.002+01:00

I come from a jam-making family.

We make the fruity kind, and the being-in-the-right-place-at-the-right-time kind.

This morning I had a big, hefty dollop of the second kind with my toast.

***

Last night Badger was reading a textbook published by my favourite textbook publishers. (Ok, I realise I am coming across as slightly geeky here, that's fine.)

Entirely unprompted, she suddenly said "You should write for these people - you could write one of these. I saw on their website that they like people to email them if they want to write for them ... go on. You should. Go on."

Clearly an outrageous suggestion. I had no intention of following it up.

This morning, eating my breakfast, I found myself emailing them. This afternoon I got an excited reply email asking what I was up to tonight. This evening I had the first step of the 'audition process' with them on the phone.

I sort of wondered if they do this every week ... but no, apparently it's more like every six months. It was a phone conference thing, which they had already invited four other prospective authors to. Everybody else was in the US. It was all really quite fun.

I might get to write a book for them. I would very very much like to write a book for them. They think they would like me to write a book for them too ... maybe. (Lots more steps to go, but so far it is looking kind of positive).

If I had emailed them tomorrow it would have been too late.

I told them that if I was a superhero then my superpower would be tessellating.

Apparently this is what clinched it ...

Ms Melancholy is being very indulgent of my excitement. And quite stunned by my jam making skills. Again.

I am wondering whether Badger is psychic. But I shall keep this quiet, as everybody already wants to borrow our Badger and if they know she has magic powers then we might never get her back!

The Breakfast Club

2008-06-10T18:00:00.001+01:00

I have been invited to join a breakfast club.

I have absolutely no idea what a breakfast club is, or why someone would want to join me in my pjs at stupid o'clock whilst I bemoan my lack of sleep and the fact that I have burnt my toast again.*

I told Stray.

"I have been invited to join a breakfast club" I said.

"Mmmm" she said.

"What is a breakfast club?" I said.

"It's a club for people who think they are so fucking important that they can't eat a croissant without simultaneously holding a seminar" she said.

"Ah" I said.

"..and only attended by those who are so socially inept that it's the only way they can make relationships with people outside of their own dull-as-fuck profession."

"Accountants?" I said.

"Indeed" she said.

I think thats probably a no then, although the fact that they have invited a psychotherapist intrigues me. I might turn up for just the one. I could analyse their breakfast choices with some over-interpretive pseudo-Freudian nonsense and cheer myself up for at least half an hour.

Organic free trade muesli? Generalised anxiety disorder, probably.

Egg white omelette? Histrionic personality, repressed by an undiagnosed eating disorder.

Pork sausage? Small-penis neurosis, obviously.

And if Ally Sheedy and Emilio Estevez are there, I may stay for the long haul.

* My toast-making skills are legendary. Stray only knows it's morning by the smell of burnt toast drifting up the stairs. The first time I stayed at my best friend's house when I was a wee little 7 yr old, I corrected her mum on her technique. With great sincerity I told her that my mum made toast differently: she cooks it 'til it's black and then scrapes it with a knife over the bin, I informed her. I had no idea why it made her laugh.

Postscript: On telling Badger:

"Goodness gracious! Isn't that where people have sex in their scuba suits?"

No, I have absolutely no idea either.

Capital punishment

2008-06-09T12:02:00.004+01:00

I just received the following email message from my father:

Hi Stray,

capitalised is spelld wrongously on your krib shite.

If you want it to be on the walls of unsuspecting children, it will need to be amenderated.

With deep parental love,

Dad

He may have been spending too much time chatting on facebook with George Bush, but he is absolutely correct (the error is within the section about hyphens). My sincere apologies to anyone who has already distributed this sheet (or shite) as a hand-out in their school/family/church/neighbourhood.

The corrected version can now be downloaded.

As Misssy M has now rebranded chasing-sheep as a public service, I should state that I have the full backing of my colleagues. I will of course be reconsidering my position in due course, and making the entirely voluntary decision to tender my resignation in order to spend more time with my family.

***

In unrelated news, it is very sunny and I am writing this in my garden. Bliss!

Sights of summer....

2008-06-08T16:31:00.007+01:00

I have been down south in distant lands for 9 days and was very happy indeed to today come back to this, I have been rolling in meadows full of flowers and snapping away with my camera so as not to miss it....

Eats, shits and leaves: colonic irritation

2008-06-08T11:50:00.000+01:00

I am not a terrible writer. I've got a reputation for turning out technical documents that make complex things seem almost understandable. I somehow fluked getting a paper published when I was a mere first-year undergraduate, and was editor of my university weekly newsletter.

As a very little thing I took to writing rapidly. I would say that I've been using the written word usefully for about 27 years, and yet yesterday afternoon my relationship with writing changed completely. I am transformed. Can you tell what it is yet?

Reader, yesterday I learned how to punctuate.

Ms M has been dutifully reading my chapter drafts, and during a beautiful stroll through fields of wildflowers in the morning she commented gently on the liberal use of dashes in my writing. She had a very good point. As we chatted, it became obvious that neither of us had more than the most shaky grasp of the rules of punctuation.

Newsflash: The rules of punctuation rock!

As soon as we got back from our walk, I pulled out The Penguin Guide to Punctuation. Bloody brilliant. (Use of fragments is permitted for stylistic impact.)

I learned that - and this was a big revelation - dashes can be used to off set strong interruption. Commas, less popular in blogland, only indicate a weak interruption. Brackets are a legal substitute for either, but are preferred where the content is an aside to the reader (obviously) or is an additional level of detail.

Fantastic stuff! I couldn't put it down. Ms M "oohed" and "ahed" as I read out the exact circumstances under which it is appropriate to use an apostrophe-s to indicate a plural while she baked date and apple brownies. We are so rock and roll.

As any good geek would, I knocked up a crib-sheet (picture above) and whizzed through the first few chapters of my book with comma-confidence, banishing fudged subclauses and brandishing my new secret weapon: the colon.

It's ironic really. I would think nothing of picking up a new computer language and cramming my brain full of obscure syntax and semantics, and yet I secretly shook at the mere mention of a semi-colon. It turns out it's all quite straightforward if you're a rules-kinda-person. I am a rules-kinda-person.

The crib-sheet is downloadable here. Just the one page. In case you have any little ones, because obviously all us grown-ups know the rules already.

How to win friends and influence people....

2008-06-07T10:40:00.001+01:00

We have had friends staying with us this week, from that there London-village. They were intrigued. How come, they asked, after only a short six months of living out in the middle of nowheres-ville, the locals are treating us like one of their own? How come the farmers wave hello each morning, the chef comes out of the pub kitchen for a chat and we have already been approved as a foster-family for next season's orphaned lambs? (Oh yes, it's true! Not only can lesbian and gay couples foster actual children, we can also foster orphaned lambs! How cool is that?)

How come a lesbian couple plus Badger-ish friend are so warmly accepted? Is it Stray's minor celebrity status (she used to be on the tele-box y'know) or the fact that they get free counselling over a pint from me? Neither of these, of course. Our secret weapon is Badger.

Badger, for those of you who don't keep up, has Tourette syndrome.

TS is a neurological disorder which gives rise to motor and verbal tics which can feel impossible to control, as Badger described in her Post of the Week winning post here. Perhaps as a result of this - or possibly it is entirely unrelated - Badger has the remarkable knack of just being herself with whomever she comes into contact with.

Most of us will invest a significant amount of energy in monitoring or controlling our impulses and behaviours in order to make ourselves as acceptable as possible to others. Inevitably we end up projecting out our internal critic and responding to others accordingly. It all gets terribly messy and before we know it we are engaging with an imagined process rather than a genuine relationship. Badger's world doesn't permit for this.

Although the received wisdom is that people with TS swear uncontrollably, the vast majority have physical and/or verbal tics which aren't remotely offensive. Badger, for sure, doesn't have the get-down-and-dirty rap version.

Badger has the Jane Austen remix.

Life with Badger is punctuated mostly with Goodness Gracious Me!!'s, Lordy Lordy!!'s and Sweet Baby Jesus!!'s, all delivered in the deepest Surrey accent. She is the secret love-child of Anne of Green Gables and Mr Darcy.

Which is how come Badger is our secret weapon. She delights people. She utterly disarms them until it is impossible not to warm to her. Badger is always just Badger, and I suspect others find this strangely liberating.

Every home should have one.

A cardio-cappucino, Thalgomince with spaghetti and a frigi-thalgo wrap for desert please ...

2008-06-06T22:24:00.004+01:00

When Badger came back from scouting our new gym and described the cardio equipment as 'giant coffee machines' I had to wonder what kind of Badgerism this was : Type A Badgerisms involve saying exactly what she means, where Type B Badgerisms require some sort of alternative-reality filter in order to interpret the intended terminology.

In this case it was a perfectly observed Type A. The running, rowing and cross training machines are beautifully sculpted in matt black plastic and shinier-than-our-new-dualit-toaster chrome. It's a brilliant incentive: one more mile and you can have a frothy coffee.

Skipping past that weighty stuff and into the changing rooms, it seems that the cardio room isn't the only place offering refreshments. The spa is offering Thalgomince (LC24), with the following tasty description:

This rich and creamy texture envelops the skin in a real "SLIMMING patch." This new technology specially designed for continuous diffusion will act throughout the day to empty the adipocytes and prevent the storage of fat. As if the tissue were being "re-educated", the adipocytes become cells with a "non-storage" structure once again. The ideal partner* for keeping your figure free from unsightly bulges.

Great! We'll have ours with spaghetti. And a couple of Frigi-thalgo wraps whilst you're at it:

A cold wrap treatment, designed to control excess fluid in the hip, leg and thigh areas. Good for attacking cellulite and fluid retention, and provides relief for tired legs. The coldness of the wrap stimulates circulatory changes and might be ideal for kick-starting a diet.

Just what I fancy ... does it come with chocolate sprinkles? Oh, and could you bear to do another couple of strokes on the rowing machine - I quite fancy an Americano ...

* The other half of the partnership being ~~Doctor~~ Gillian McKeith with a loud hailer, screaming "Step away from the pie, you're fucking enormous!"

Heaven is ...

2008-06-05T09:35:00.002+01:00

Drinking tea in the sunshine in the garden at breakfast time. Being paid to write a book that really excites me. Ruby lying on her blanket at my feet, cats safely locked in the office, as we are enjoying the sights and sounds of baby blackbirds fledging. Parents chirping instructions, whilst fluffy brown things with unsteady wings hop up and down the mountain bikes beside me. Wall to bike, bike to wall. I wonder if I am interrupting but they don't seem bothered by Ruby and I. Skipping into the porch corner behind my chair.

When you arrive somewhere in autumn or winter, spring really is a surprise.

Finding a balance ...

2008-06-03T18:48:00.006+01:00

I appear to have scared everybody off by blogging about politics. Shhh!

So, to compensate for my misdemeanour, I will share the last google search to land someone on this blog :

'dirty poems about sheep' (warning - this link may not be Badger Friendly)

Is that a more comfortable level? ;)

But seriously, I seem to have shifted from asking "is that too personal?" when I write to wondering "is this too impersonal?". I have given myself permission to blog my verucca*, but I still feel a bit wobbly about sharing my world view. This does not sit comfortably with writing a book about how to save the planet. You will read it when it's finished? And not be cross that it doesn't have any fornicating frogs or photos of Ruby in it?**

*For those who are interested, I have had a verucca on my left foot for over 10 years. I have half-treated it numerous times and always lost interest just in time to let the little bugger recover. And then a few weeks ago it spontaneously disappeared, just after I returned from a weekend of traipsing through deep scottish peat bogs. Coincidence?

** Actually, the book features both fornicating*** frogs and photographs of Ruby - how could I let you down?

*** Badger thought fornicating was a kind of dance. I suppose she's not entirely wrong :) Badgers**** are brill, every family should have one.

**** Did you know that Badger is doing all the design / artwork / graphics / layout for the book? She is really really really talented. We are going to put her on Britain's Got Talent. Doing animal impressions and photoshop manipulations at the same time.

A vision of public spending in the UK: versions 1 and 2

2008-06-02T21:10:00.006+01:00

Solution 1

The final chapter of this book thing I'm writing includes a proposal for restructuring our tax system. It then sets down a competition to design a more detailed solution, but the basic premise is something we're calling PIE ... which will one day stand for something but doesn't yet :)

In a nut shell, when a citizen votes they would also be able to directly allocate a significant amount of tax revenue to various different buckets. There would be buckets for health care, education, defence, housing, public transport subsidy, international development ...

The money that voters could directly distribute would be about 10% of the total tax revenue, on a rolling basis, so each bucket-department would know that they had at least 90% of the money they were allocated last time around.

Each bucket-department would have to disclose exactly what they're spending that base 90% on, and what they would spend each additional bit of cash they might get on should they be allocated it.

The impact it would have on our relationship with the government could be quite profound. Discussing it with other people, someone has suggested that in some ways it's the integration of Marxism and Consumerism. I'm no marxist scholar but it seems that Marx believed that the course of history was headed towards a flatter structure, in which us little people held the power and the state was little more than a professional system for implementing our decisions.

With PIE our government could only maintain a standing professional military if we chose to fund it. For me this is a really exciting prospect. If our leaders really felt that they wanted to take military action in the absence of a UN coalition they would have to hold a referendum to ask for the money.

Some people have said that it sounds a little outrageous ... so I'd like to describe an alternative solution.

Solution 2

Imagine we allow a handful of people to make decisions as to how the whole pot of money is divided. Make them read out some overall figures to us once or twice a year, but don't require them to detail what they propose to spend the money on within each area.

Let them allocate sufficient money to defence to allow our government to go to war without the direct support of the population as long as one or two other governments are interested in pursuing the same agenda.

Leave the trivial stuff, you know, giving hope to deprived children, nursing people with cancer, air ambulances, equipment for people with disabilities ... leave those little luxuries to be provided for by money raised through charity game shows and reality TV phone-ins!

Hey - anyone remember You Bet! ? A genius way to fund those inessential social care programmes!

Gary from Colchester claims he can recognise 150 models of 1970s saloon car, just from a photograph of the driver side wing mirror, in under 2 minutes! 74% of the studio audience and 2 of our celebrities believe he can do it. If Gary can pull it off then we'll give £7400 to their nominated charities - Macmillan Nurses and the NSPCC! If he can't then we'll give £2,600 to a physiotherapy center for children with cerebral palsy. Gary - are you ready?

Matthew - YOU BET I am!

Wonderful stuff. A beautiful vision of modern democracy.

The choice is yours ...

So - which is a better way to distribute around 500 billion quid? I'll tell you what - let's hold a phone-vote and 12 pence of every call will go to charity!

Sentimental post alert

2008-05-31T23:03:00.010+01:00

Living with Stray is not without its surprises. (I shan't mention her current obsession with memorising sheep breeds, nor her plans for launching the sheep version of Top Trumps in time for Christmas.)

She has a remarkable intolerance for most television, but reserves a particular contempt for badly made documentaries. In a former life she used to write, direct and present factual TV which makes her something of an expert on the subject.

As I have come to realise.

Repeatedly.

Strange then, that her intolerance of flakey documentaries is matched only by her phenomenal tolerance for populist crap. Which is how come I know exactly who won X Factor, American Idol and that ice skating malarkey, for the first time in my life.

And how come I have just spent the evening blubbing like a loon with Stray as we watched this amazing young man win Britain's Got Talent.

Bet you cried too, didn't you?

Would you buy a book called ...

2008-05-31T16:56:00.004+01:00

Homo Sapiens Globalis

The species that can save our planet.

It's a serious question. Finding a useful title for the book I'm working on is proving to be incredibly difficult.

Having completed all the chapter introductions and summaries, and the bullet pointed content from cover to cover, I'm now at the point where calling it 'the book' isn't cutting it anymore. Someone who has a potential hook into a publisher wants to read an overview, and the overview needs at least a working title. Today I'm attempting the 400 / 200 / 100 / 50 / 20 and 10 word synopsis. Many versions of each. The title above is a 10 word synopsis. I think I like it, but I need feedback!

Oddly I came up with the term 'Homo Sapiens Globalis' without even knowing if 'Globalis' was valid Latin, and then when I googled it I found that a couple of people have used the term to mean precisely what I am intending. That bodes well, surely?

So - as to the synopsis, the front cover of this book will also bare the statement:

Why the threat of Global Climate Change is the greatest opportunity ever to have faced the human race.

The back of the jacket might say something like:

Global Climate Change is not a technical problem - zero-carbon energy sources are available and well understood today. Global Climate Change is not an economic problem - a world that can afford Formula One, Space exploration and armed conflict is not unable to find the money to fund the technological solution. Global Climate Change is a human problem. If we do not successfully address the threat to the livability of our planet it will be because our own human nature got in the way.

So - are you interested? Would you pick it up and give it a flick through? Inside it's a mix of normal text and light hearted illustrations - not entirely dissimilar to the "Jung for Beginners" kind of books. It's being pitched at bright 13 year olds upwards - not too dry and stuffy but with a lot of quite complex ideas in it.

I'll also be looking for readers for the first and second drafts. Any volunteers?

*edit: This is a book for grown-ups too! It's intended to be mainstream - we've included smart young people in the target group because they're particularly good at weeding out jargon etc, and because they're the generation who have most investment in the outcome.

Speed blogging because lately ...

2008-05-26T18:54:00.005+01:00

... I am dehydrating. Everything. It's the best science experiment I've done in years. To take camping of course. Little bags of mexican chicken in the freezer. Making my own instant mashed potato. The miracle of putting the water back in and it all going back to how you made it is quite thrilling. Water eh? Oxygen and hydrogen ... who'd have thunk it?

Our trip to Scotland was amazing, thrilling, terrifying, exhausting and the most exercise I have done ever. 5 hours hiking with gear in difficult terrain to get to the most amazingly remote spot out the back of Ben Nevis, at the foot of Stob Ban. Gorgeous, remote, breathtaking, great weather ... I was actually thinking that I might be the happiest I'd ever been in my life. The next afternoon, Ms M and I said goodbye to our friends and their boxer dog at the peak, as they descended north whilst we went back south to camp for another night, having the monday off. We made good progress down to the coll between the 3 peaks, and then suddenly we lost Ruby.

An hour of shouting later, the weather came down hard and fast and we left the coll to descend, heartbroken, sobbing. I stuck a pole in the ground on top of a mound of dirt in the hope that we might return to look for her again in the morning as we dragged ourselves back through a bog for 2 hours and struggled to cross the swollen river. Suddenly the vastness of the landscape and remoteness of the location felt overwhelming rather than exhilarating. Back at camp we concluded that Ruby must have succumbed to her heart valve problem - she's never had any symptoms but the vets do warn me that her life could end suddenly at any time. Lots of tears. I kept telling myself that this was not the littlest Hobo. There would be no happy ending, my baby was lost and probably dead or badly injured and I would never cuddle her again.

And then. Five hours after we lost her. A woof. Far away. I know that is Ruby's woof. Ms M and I stared at each other. I blew the whistle. Two woofs. Definitely Ruby's woofs. Far away, but getting closer. And then, coming from the other side of the mountain, a little brown spot running in the distance.

She ran and ran and ran until she reached us. It was like the end of a made-for-tv movie. I hugged her and she shook next to me. She was bleeding quite badly from a ripped claw and cut paws, and suddenly instead of looking like a paranoid overpacker I looked like a well prepared sensible person as I took the dog supplies out of the first aid kit and bandaged her paw.

She slept as late as possible the next morning as we packed up around her. I carried her pack as we limped collectively back to the car for four hours. Where had she been? No answers, but a theory - she thought the others were lost. The point at which she left us was where our path would have had line of sight / hearing / smell with their path. She almost certainly went to try to round them up, but couldn't catch up with them, and miraculously made the decision to return to the place we had slept the night before - even though that would have been three or four miles away and on the other side of a huge peak. I am sure she thinks it was us who were lost, and is relieved that we had the good sense to go back to her tent ;)

Other than that I'm writing. Writing the book. Need to blog some of it soon. Get your feedback if that's ok? Planning a couple more books. Planning on doing something different when I grow up. Planning another camping trip in June, and making my own dehydrated packet food. Suggestions for recipes very gratefully received!

The Patch!

2008-05-20T15:29:00.003+01:00

Over the past few months I have been growing things in pots from seed and chitting potatoes on the window in preparation for my new vegatable venture.

I had a go last year in the tree house in Surrey but the elements were against me, including gale force winds blowing almost everything over... but I have not given in.

Back in February I took myself off to the local garden centre (I say local, nothing is really local around here, it was a 60 mile round trip), but I came back armed with packets of seeds and bags of compost. Since then I have grown 4 varieties of Tomato plants, which promise to give me a selection of yellow and red tomatoes.

My salad leaves are coming on very well indeed and I think we could even start grazing on them.

I also planted some broccoli seeds indoors back in late Feb and last week they were ready to go out into the patch. Their stalks are still rather thin but I hope they will grow to be strong. At the same time I also planted a few stronger plants straight outside, this included the elephant garlic and onions. Both these are coming along very well and they made it through all the snow we had.

Now the weather has improved I have put a few more things straight into the ground, including radishes, beetroots, potatoes, dwarf beans, and carrots. My potatoes would you believe were only planted 2 weeks ago and they have gone crazy, I hope I planted them deep enough, this is my biggest worry, other than my cat Frank being a complete bastard and digging everything up. I swear he is so full of self importance that he thinks I am making these dirt areas as outdoor litter trays for him.

Katy over at the potting shed gave me some of her finest Cauliflowers to rear in the patch. She also gave me a wonderful Strawberry tip which was to arange 3 Strawberry plants in a hanging basket and then the strawbs will grow over the edge ready for eating. This way no slugs can get them and they cannot rot on the ground.

sometimes a big cigar is just a big cigar

2008-04-26T09:41:00.006+01:00

I think I know myself pretty well. I have been therapied to within an inch of my life, after all.

Every now and again my unconscious throws me up a dream, just to remind me that I'm not quite as in charge as my rather smug observing self believes. It's the usual stuff - car brakes won't work/being chased by scary people/naked on toilet in lift......

(The 'naked on toilet in lift with doors about to open' is the mother of all anxiety dreams, and if you've never had it I suggest you have a long hard word with your psyche right now. It's something that everyone should try at least once in their lives, rather like taking acid or going to a Kylie concert.)

Every now and again my unconscious throws me something entirely random - just to take the piss probably - which I then feel utterly compelled to make some sense of. It's my job, innit?

So, to last night's offerings.........

I visit the local farmer, riding my giant dustbuster. Apparently it's a very green mode of transport and is surprisingly comfortable. It's just an added bonus that it cleans the roads as you ride.

I park up my oversized but ecologically sound dustbuster, to be greeted by his giant hamsters. I am pleased, for it is indeed the giant hamsters which have prompted my visit. We have a weasel problem, you see, and the giant hamsters provide excellent weasel control.

Of course I can borrow them, he says, and whilst he sorts out the paperwork - which is all in Spanish - he tells me about the Blues band he plays in and when they are next gigging. I make a mental note.

He harnesses up the hamsters - the last thing you want is these things running wild - and I ask for his phone number in case something goes wrong. He gives me it in Spanish, French and Italian and I mount my dustbuster, musing on how educated these farmers are.

Pure randomness.

My sister once had a dream that she was riding a Netto carrier bag in the parents' carrier bag race at the school sports day. She won.

Lambing around.....

2008-04-22T16:15:00.004+01:00

Today it is lovely and warm and all the lambs are frolicking in the sunshine, so I took the opportunity to take some photos of them.

Badgers wheezy stay in MAU...

2008-04-13T07:52:00.002+01:00

During my stay in the Medical Assessment Unit I was situated by a window which looked out from the front of the hospital. I was pleased to have a window. In fact now I think of it other asthma people were by the window as well, maybe it was in some hope of getting the smallest scrap of breeze slip through a window and save you from the ever choking heat being circulated around the building.

As my view was to the front I watched all the buses tooing and frowing when I decided I would create a bus chart/time table, and like anything Badger related when I set my mind to something it is VERY important the job is done properly. Once I did not finish my science exam because I HAD to count all the tiles on the ceiling in the school hall. There are a few gaps in my chart I can only assume due to it being a saturday so maybe some buses were less frequent.

Being in hospital was very dull albeit safe and being that I had driven for 6 hours before I got sick I landed up in a southern hospital, I noted I got dinner in the afternoons and not tea which made me happy indeed (until it arrived of course!).

There were a lot of very elderly people in MAU and they were all either very deaf or not with it at all. There were routine questions for the confused ones and I have learnt that WW2 was 1939 - 1945. I did say to one doctor when she came to me next after seeing a very confused old lady "Please don't ask me when World War 2 was, I am not confused but my general knowledge is lacking in historical dates"... she smiled. All the doctors were lovely. All 8 of them that I saw over my 70 hour stay.

Its good to be out!

Get Well Soon Badger!

2008-04-11T11:38:00.003+01:00

Little Badger is all wheezy and has spent the night in hospital having oxygen and things to help her breathe. She is all the way down in Surrey so Ms M and I can't visit, and Frank is most disappointed not to be able to go and see her.

I'm quite glad she was down in the town though in some ways - it's a good hour and a bit round trip to get to A&E in an ambulance out here. There is a helicopter during the day but at night you're in the back of a 4x4, though I suspect Ms M and I would have whisked Badger to the hospital much sooner if she had been here. I certainly wouldn't have waited til her peak flow was only 70! (For those who don't have Asthma, it's advisable to phone an ambulance for anything less than 50% of your top flow - in my case that's anything under 250).

We shall have to be sure to take better care of her when she returns. It's a tricky thing, knowing how best to care for a Badger. Mostly they care quite well for themselves, but from time to time they need a bit of looking after. I spoke to the head nurse on Badger's ward this morning and asked if Badger had mentioned that she has tourettes and is Aspie ... she thought she hadn't, but was very understanding about why Badger might not have and also glad that I had told her.

Mostly Badger's little ways and misunderstandings simply make us laugh and smile - a recent classic being that Badger thought Ms M had said she would prefer her chicken inbred ... she was most relieved to find that she was talking about a sandwich - but sometimes I do worry about the potential less sitcom-like consequences of little confusions.

Badger isn't unique in needing a bit of looking after - I think most of us are similarly able to manage 90 - 95% of our lives perfectly well and a bit flumoxed by the other bit. And I'm sure I'm not unique in wondering where the line is between helping and interfering!

The book I'm working on a the moment deals quite a lot with this - a very western problem around the illusion of individualism. We are encouraged to be 'independent' and to mind our own business, being needy is an insult and self-containment is a goal. And yet it's all bollocks. Anyone who uses a supermarket is dependent upon millions of people involved in the processes that put those products on the shelves.

The subject-object-verb nature of our own language shapes our world into one in which the individual person is central and we do things to each other. The anthropologist I'm working with on the book is married to a wonderful woman who's first language is Japanese. She speaks in generalities, often skipping a subject altogether. It can occasionally be confusing (my friend often finds himself having to directly ask for the name of the person being discussed!) but it does lead to an entirely different understanding of the meaning of being. Apparently there are some cultures in which there is literally no way of saying "The doctor does xyz to the patient", and instead they would say that the doctor and the sick person were working together to increase wellness.

So, I hope when Badger reads this she is feeling better and on the mend, we are looking forward to having her home safe!

Cat friendly Pub...

2008-04-09T08:51:00.002+01:00

It would seem that our local village pub is not only dog friendly but it also cat friendly.

Last night, young Frank followed me to the pub, its not far, maybe 200 yards. Now normally he would potter off home once seeing me off inside safely.

However last night he was insistent that he too wished to come in. He spent the first half hour embarrasing me by mieowing at the door like some sort of deranged animal. He was so loud that everyone in the pub could hear him shouting. In the end the landlady said I should let him in, so in he came and sat next to me while I finished my pint. We then trotted home together. Bless him, Frank the pub cat.

While I am here I would also like to mention my secret magic place I have found in the village. It is up a beck and no one goes there, especially not tourists as it is not a footpath and some what of a hairy climb in places to get to it, but as I rounded the corner I found this opening and I could picture myself lying here in the summer, next to the river (which is, as you will see some what a dry river in this picture), but I shall come here and watch the wildlife and read my books. On my walk up I saw a Kestrel tormenting a Tawny Owl, I saw Lapwings and lots and lots of Rabbits.

Freud was right after all.....

2008-03-29T19:06:00.005Z

The chasing sheep family are planning a long walk up a big hill in Scotland. It will involve an overnight camp, which requires us to carry all of our equipment. We are very well equipped, mostly courtesy of our local walking shop who, not surprisingly, rub their hands together whenever we walk in. There is only essential piece of kit that we lack.

Our local walking shop doesn't sell penises. Sadly, neither does the interwebulator although I am heartened to learn that once in possession of one you can get it extended for the bargain price of 99 dollars.

You may wonder why the penis is an essential piece of walking kit? Contrary to popular belief, it doesn't endow you with the ability to read maps, use a compass or navigate your way back in the dark using only testosterone as a homing device. The one major benefit of the humble penis is that it allows you to pee outdoors in a relatively discrete manner, whilst us girls are destined to fumble around in a copse getting nettle stings on our arses and peeing on our boots.

But no longer. Get thee behind me, penis envy, for I have discovered this.

The Shewee technically solves the peeing-outdoor dilemma. I say technically, because you first have to persuade your brain that it is absolutely ok to pee standing up without first removing all of your clothes. And I haven't managed that bit yet. My brain remains convinced that I am about to wet myself, and refuses utterly to relinquish bladder control.

I am practicing.

It's a miracle!

2008-03-18T21:21:00.006Z

At the grand age of 31 years and 51 weeks I have finally reached 5ft tall.

I have been measured many times in the last decade - I've even had a full body scan by lasers. I have been consistently 1 meter 51.2 cm (about 4'11''). I have a growth hormone deficiency so I've been measured more than your average bear. A lot. Loads.

And then ... today ... I am 1 meter 53 cm ... which is just over 5ft.

I don't know quite what to make of this. I should point out that this is an official measurement by a real nurse on a clever machine, not just Badger with pencil up against a doorframe. Lovely nurse was quite amused at my incredulity and checked it and checked it again. She confirmed that people do not regularly state that it has over-measured them. (She also did my BMI. It was not nearly enough. Please send chocolate, egg shaped or otherwise.)

Bizarrely, my dad confirmed that I appeared taller when we met up a few weeks ago. Even weirder, I actually feel taller. Just a little.

This is very strange.

Very strange indeed.

There are only two possible explanations.

My head says: I am now living at an average of 250m above sea level. I am further from the center of mass of the earth and closer to the moon. The gravitational forces acting on my body have caused me to become stretched.

My heart says: Kissing Ms Melancholy can make you taller.

Frogs' Porn....

2008-03-16T20:10:00.009Z

Having spent a hard week ministering to the walking wounded, I was eager to spend some time communing with nature and recovering my perspective on the world.

So this weekend I have been mostly disturbed by....

- the suicidal sheep who decided to birth her twin lambs in the middle of the road.

- the oyster catchers who are busy building their nests in the dry river bed, ignorant of the fact that as soon as it rains the water will torrent off the hills and they will be swept away.

- the wrens who are nesting in our neighbour's soon-to-be-lit bonfire.

- this orgy of bacchanalian proportions in our water trough, which, frankly, disturbs me in a way I can't quite fathom.

Photographed by brave Badger

If celebrities couldn't lie ...

2008-03-14T20:37:00.002Z

So, Mr / Ms Sports-celebrity, why are you learning to camel race for Sports Relief?

Well, I'm raising money for children with disabilities because our society has abandoned all concept of collective responsibility for the young / sick / old / disadvantaged people in our community. We refuse to pay more taxes because we don't trust the government not to give it all to chavs / spend it on coffee machines from John Lewis. I could personally afford to give away 90% of what I earn and still live like a king, but hey - why the hell should I? Instead I'm generously giving a whole 2 days of my precious time up to go on an all-expenses-paid trip to a far flung place where the children are cuter and less gobby than the little shits in that council estate I won't park my Lexus in.

Grrr ...

2008-03-10T16:10:00.003Z

Designer: It's a website for x-brand, so, you know, it needs to be really cool.

Stray: Ok. No worries. Right, now, accessibility - have you put some thought into how this layout behaves as the text sizes get bigger?

Designer: Oh, I don't think we need to worry about that. It's not that kind of site.

Stray: Oh - yes - you're right - because people with disabilities aren't cool?

Designer: Um. That's harsh. I mean ... it's a business to business site.

Stray: Oh yes, of course - people with disabilities don't work!

Designer: No! Oh ... Er. Well ... it's just that it's not the client's priority.

Stray: Oh. Well, you know, if you could just make it clear to them that we're legally obliged to do it, and if they really want to ignore it they can sign a waiver ... but really, there's no excuse.

---

Twats.

Really? I mean really? It's not like I'm talking about making the whole site bloody breath activated, just about offering increased font sizes because you don't actually have to be congenitally blind to find 10-point-super-cool-almost-japanese-font over the top of photos difficult to read!

Grrr.

When I was only twelve...

2008-03-09T16:40:00.008Z

In an improbable wander through the performing arts, Scarlett Johansson is to record an album of Tom Waits' covers. Perhaps I lack imagination, but I can't quite picture her singing about Lucky Strikes, Mexican whorehouses or, for that matter, heart attacks (with or without the vine) with any real conviction. Which leads me to guess that she is making an album of Waits' ballads, not this stuff.....

There is a very fine line between emotionality and sentimentality, and I have never heard a cover of a Tom Waits' ballad that didn't make me want to weep with despair at the very awfulness of it. I am thinking Rod Stewart's drivelling attempt at Downtown Train (a song the NME described as 'the best song that Springsteen never wrote') or even Springsteen's ludicrously saccharine cover of Jersey Girl. Johannsson, step away from the project now, please, and save us all the embarrassment.

In an almost seamless link, this reminds me of a conversation Stray and I had recently about the best ever cover of Dylan's All Along The Watchtower. My favourite is undoubtedly this cover by XTC, circa 1978 when they were at the vanguard of post-punk pop.

Which brings me, tangentially, to the point of this mostly meaningless post. Which is simply to say out loud that I discovered this on YouTube recently and it made me want to jump around like the 12 yr old that I was when I first heard it. If ever I am stranded on Roy Plumley's desert island, it would be a very close call between this and the Lacrimosa from Mozart's Requiem as my number one choice. Both make me want to cry (but not in the same way as a whole album dedicated to massacring the back catalogue of one the twentieth century's best singer songwriters.)

Bloody fab, isn't it?

What makes you wish you were 12 again?

This evening I am mostly ...

2008-03-07T21:54:00.004Z

... grateful that Paula Abdul is not my next of kin.

The doctors would not have a clue what she had decided.

Apologies to those who do not watch American Idol.

Ms Melancholy has of course pointed out that if I am ever in a situation where Randy Jackson, Paula Abdul and Simon Cowell are deciding my fate then I should just tell myself firmly to wake up immediately.

Phew.

In other news, there is no word of lamb2 as yet. We watched several bound around one of the crofts earlier, and I think I may have recognised lamb1 and lamb2 with their mother but I couldn't be certain. Fingers and paws still crossed!

Watching and waiting ...

2008-03-06T15:37:00.005Z

Just after lunchtime today a little white splodge appeared behind a sheep in the field above our cottage. We watched through binoculars as its mother licked it clean and rolled it over. We saw it wobble on weak knees for almost 20 minutes until it finally stood up and fed. Life. Lovely.

An hour ago another splodge appeared near to the first one. The mother sheep did not lick it clean or roll it over. It didn't move. Half an hour later the farmer strode up the field and gathered it under his arm. The mother sheep did not seem to notice. We leaned over the wall to get his phone number and answer his questions. It is still breathing but its eyes are closed. It's tiny.

Just three hours old, lamb number one is running about behind its mother. Lamb number two is in the warming oven of the farmer's rayburn. You never know, he said.